Bill McRea

Do you hear the sound of crickets chirping when you visit your blog? Are you looking to generate some activity, and engagement, attract more visitors who are interested in your blog? In order to do that you’ve got to generate some buzz using social media and all of the other Marketing channels at your disposal. In this article we’ve got five fab tips that you can use to make your blog juicier, more appealing and increase the buzz around your blog and your brand. We’re going to banish the boring and bring in activity, engagement and with any luck increase your traffic and sales.

1. Establish measurable goals for your campaign

The term, “buzz,” generally means you’ll be drumming up interest and activity around your brand and your website. You want to attract attention, let your audience know what you are up to and how getting involved will benefit them. But without setting some goals at the outset you’ll never know if you’ve achieved success or not. Take a look at your current traffic stats, the number of friends and followers you’ve got on your social media profiles, and then decide to what degree you want to grow those numbers. Aim to meet or exceed your goals.

2. Develop a content creation plan

Your content is what is going to attract the visitors and bring the desired attention and engagement that you are looking for. Whether you are going to create a free ebook, a series of videos or blog posts, take the time to create the content that your audience is craving. Make it so that they are wondering why you are offering this stuff for free. Write up some press releases and submit them to directories. Write a series of articles using your primary keywords and submit them to the top article directories. When you have created valuable content that your visitors will comment on and share with their network, this will begin to create that buzz.

3. Work your network

Contact a few of your colleagues and let them know about your campaign. Ask them to share your content with their network and maybe even send an email to their list about your campaign. It helps to already have established network or tribe that you have established a mutually beneficial working relationship with.

4. Decide which social media platforms you will focus on

Are you active on Facebook? Do you have a lot of followers on Twitter? Have you gotten started with Pinterest.com yet? Choose which social media platforms you will focus on and begin to customize your content for these platforms. Write up some status updates for your Facebook and Google+ profiles. Host a live Twitter party on Twitter, Get some images created that are related to your campaign and share them on Pinterest. Host a Hangout on Google+.

5. Execute your plan

Create a schedule for your campaign and make sure that your audience knows what is happening when. If you will be hosting a contest, make sure the deadlines are clearly communicated. Follow up on your plans and ask for help and support where you need it.

When your campaign is over, be sure to compare your analytics reports to the benchmark reports you created before you began. If you achieved your goals, then celebrate your win. If not, look at how you can improve next time. social media marketing can be a fun and effective way to attract all of the buzz and targeted traffic you will need for your blog.

For more social media marketing tips and strategies, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today where you’ll discover how you can grow your online business using Internet Marketing techniques.

Are you an information marketer who has a good selection of free ebooks that you give away to visitors to your website? ebook Marketing is an effective way to allow your visitors to get a taste of the kind of content you offer so that they will come back and eventually purchase the products that you offer for sale. Chances are those ebooks are saved in .PDF format so that visitors can download them and either read them on their computer screen, or print them to read later. However, with the rising popularity of ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and the omnipresent smart phones and tablets, it’s time to think about providing different formats for your visitors to access your ebook content so that they can consume it at their convenience and share it with their friends.

Most popular ebook formats

According to Matthew Fields’ article, ‘Best eBook Formats for Self-Publishing,’ on the Social Media Chimps blog, the ePub, PDF and Kindle formats are the best and most popular formats for those who are looking to self-publish their content and make it available to a wider audience of readers.

ePub

The ePub format is, “an open standard for e-books created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).”

Ebook readers such as the Kobo eReader, Blackberry’s Playbook, Apple’s iBooks that can be read on iOS devices such as iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch, the Nook, Sony Reader and others.

PDF

Portable Document Format, by Adobe Systems, has been around since the early 1990′s. It can be read on almost every computer platform making it a very popular document format on the web.

PDF files can be read on several ebook readers including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Kobo eReader, Sony reader and several others.

Amazon Kindle (KF8)

The .kf8 file format was released in 2011 with the release of the Kindle Fire ebook reader.

Kf8 is a proprietary file format exclusively for Kindle ereader products, however, by downloading the Kindle app, users of a variety of mobile platforms can access Kindle eBooks.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

How to convert your documents to the various ebook formats     

To convert your existing content to the ePub format there are free ePub converter tools, such as can be found at 2epub.com, which is a website that allows you to convert .pdf, and .doc documents to the ePub format. It allows several input formats, and outputs .epub, fb2, lit, lrf and .mobi. It also has a utility that will convert .PDF files from any application.

Amazon DTP

On the Kindle Direct Publishing website you can convert your word processing documents into the Kindle format. It’s free to sign up for an account, and converting a document is as easy as uploading it to the site. Be sure to review the Help Topics on the Kindle DTP site. There are tutorials such as, ‘Building Your Book for Kindle,’ and ‘Prepare Your Book.’

kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin

Calibre

The Calibre website is an excellent resource if you are going to be delving into the world of creating ebooks for ereaders. They offer a free ebook library management software application that you can use to convert your ebooks, view ebooks and sync to ebook reader devices.

calibre-ebook.com/about

Here’s a link to a handy list of the steps required to prepare your ebook for publication if you’re starting form scratch: sellbox.com/amazon-kindle-direct-publishing-kdp-nook-pubit-checklist/

eBook formatting services

If all of the technical details of formatting and converting your ebooks is giving you a headache, you can always hire an ebook formatting service:

gopublished.com/

ebookarchitects.com/index.php

If you’d like more information about how you can use ebook marketing to build your online business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

It can be both exciting and a bit overwhelming when you are starting your first ecommerce website, and choosing the best online shopping cart solution is a big first step. In this article we’ll take a high level overview of the things that you should take into consideration when you are getting ready to choose a shopping cart for your website. Keep in mind that you can start small with a simple solution and then scale up as your business grows if a limited budget is an issue in the beginning.

What is a shopping cart?
An online shopping cart is a piece of software or a script that handles the collection of and the totaling up of your customer’s orders for your website. On the front end, there’s the website and all of the product pages that your customer’s are picking products from and clicking that, ‘Add to Cart,’ button. On the backend, the shopping cart keeps track of the items your customers choose, how many they want, and where it will be shipped to. When it has totaled up the amount of the order, the information gets passed along to the payment processor or merchant account where it is either approved or denied. After the payment processing has taken place the order is confirmed and the information is fed to whatever fulfillment mechanism you have in place.

Here’s how it works:

Your website ? shopping cart script ? merchant account/ payment processor

How do I choose the right shopping cart for my needs?
The answer to that question varies with every vendor. The shopping cart that you choose will depend on several factors including:

• What will your web hosting company support/ be compatible with?
• Your budget
• Number of different items you are selling
• Physical product
• Virtual/ downloadable product
• Do you want to be able to offer coupons?
• Recurring billing
• Cross selling (if you like that item, you might like this item)
• Autoresponder/ email newsletter
• Which solutions will work with my payment processor?

What kinds of online shopping carts are available?

There are basically two major categories of online shopping carts: 1. premium shopping carts and, 2. open source or free shopping carts. There are literally hundreds of different shopping cart solutions to choose from, but there are a few that are popular with online merchants for several reasons. We will only mention a few of each type, and our listing these programs is not an endorsement of them.

Premium shopping carts:

• Paypal is a no-brainer, simple ecommerce solution that might work for those who are just getting started with a small operation because it’s a shopping cart and payment processor in one. You pay a percentage of each sale, but you get free fraud protection.
• Volusion provides an extensive list of features for the ecommerce website. It includes web design tools, advanced tax features, and a social store builder.

• 1ShoppingCart is an all in one ecommerce, Marketing solution that allows you to automate your email marketing, manage affiliates, promote, manage, build and sell.

Open source/ free shopping carts:

• ZenCart

• WordPress eCommerce

• Magento

Do your research, know your needs, get familiar with what your web hosting company provides and then make an informed decision about what online shopping cart solution you will start with.

To learn more about ecommerce shopping carts, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today where you will discover tips and other resources for growing your online business.

In the world of seo there is such a focus on Google because they are the big player in this space, however, there are still opportunities to be had within the Microsoft Ad Center. You can sign up and pay for clicks that will help you to grow your online business. Your ads will show up on the Bing and Yahoo! search engine results pages. In today’s post we’re going to take a look at the Microsoft advertiser intelligence (MAI) keyword tool excel plugin. It’s free, easy to install and it yields lots of valuable information that will help you to choose the correct keywords to use for your ad campaigns and to optimize your website.

The MAI research tool makes keyword research easy and more accessible for advertisers. It examines the search behaviors and buying patterns of users, which can help you to design a more effective Marketing campaign.

The MAI keyword tool can help you accomplish the following:

• Improve ROI for your search and content marketing campaigns by giving you accurate keyword data.
• Build lists of keywords and develop an effective keyword strategy based on actual customer data
• Fine tune your keyword bidding strategies and more.

Another feature the Microsoft adCenter offers is their Free Campaign Upload service where an Internet Marketing specialist will help you by loading your ad campaign into your adCenter and activating your ads for free. They provide step-by-step instruction so that even those with no technical knowledge can reap the benefits of search marketing while they focus their time and energy on running their business.

If you’ve already got Microsoft Excel 2007 or 2010 installed on your computer, all you have to do is download and install the plugin. Make certain that MS Excel is closed when you download the plugin.

At the bottom of the download page you’ll find a PDF feature guide, a FAQ document, and an installation guide.

If you are new to Microsoft and PPC, the adCenter has a training hub you can learn about search advertising on the Microsoft ad network.

Here’s the web address to the download page: advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence

This video provides a short overview of the tool:

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Keyword Research Tool

youtu.be/XXBRJg-4Q9c

There’s also a place where you can get feedback and support when questions arise related to your Microsoft ad campaigns. It’s the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Community Forum, and you’ll find a link to the forum from the download page. This is where you can learn tips and strategies, connect with other advertisers and members of the adCenter support team.

Those who aren’t huge fans of Google products, or those who just want to expand the reach of the brand might find a fresh source of traffic leads and sales from working with Microsoft adCenter and the MAI tool with Excel. Using the valuable keyword research information that you gain from using this upgraded tool can help you gain the competitive advantage in your marketplace.

Keyword research is the foundation of a successful online marketing campaign. If you’d like to learn more valuable tips and strategies about building your business online visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.