Free solutions:

Mail Chimp

-          Pros:

• Free for up to 500 contacts
• Customizable HTML templates + WYSIWYG editor
• Import contacts + export reports
• A/B testing
• Google Analytics integration (but it’s an add on)

-          Cons:

• Lacking some of the features of the other competitors
• Only 4 basic email templates + there’s no importing template add on
• Importing contacts can be tricky (columns need to match up perfectly)
• Very limited support

-          Conclusion: Mail Chimp is a new contender in the email marketing world. They do have many advantages, particularly the free service for up to 500 contacts, but there are drawbacks. There have been issues with the reporting, but the biggest issue is by far their customer support.

Cheap solutions:

iContact

-          Pros:

• Multiple options for importing contacts
• WYSIWYG editor
• Detailed tutorials
• Pricing (better than most in this class)
• Auto responders
• Easy sign up forms (no intermediate pages like Constant Contact)
• Archive email newsletters
• Free online surveys

-          Cons:

• Limited image hosting space
• Exported reports are limited
• Fee to remove iContact logo from emails
• No A/B testing

-          Conclusion: iContact is very competitively priced at $19/month for up to 2,000 contacts. They are a very solid solution with a straightforward email editor. The biggest knock on iContact is their limited image hosting.

Constant Contact

-          Pros:

• One of the oldest email marketing services in industry (since 1996)
• Free removal of Constant Contact logo from emails
• WYSIWYG editor
• Multiple options for importing contacts
• Spam checker
• Excellent customer support

-          Cons:

• Exported reports are limited
• No A/B testing
• Image hosting is limited (but not as bad as iContact)
• No auto responders
• WYSIWYG editor is limited to Constant Contact templates; not your own HTML
• Extra fees for archiving email newsletters and online surveys

-          Conclusion: Constant Contact is no doubt the leader in email marketing. They spend by far the most on advertising, and their big company status is backed up by their excellent customer service. They are a bit costlier than most of their competitors in their league at $30/month for 500- 2,500 contacts. Not as flexible as iContact or Aweber, but solid nonetheless.

AWeber

-          Pros:

• Free removal of AWeber logo from emails
• WYSIWYG editor
• Scheduled auto responder
• Integrates with many shopping carts
• In depth reports
• A/B testing
• Good at fixing “spammy” emails

-          Cons:

• No free image hosting
• No free trial
• Limited options for importing contacts

-          Conclusion: AWeber is a decent email marketing service. All the email marketing solutions will block spam emails, but AWeber does a good job of helping users fix these problems. If you’re using ecommerce, AWeber looks like it’s one of the best solutions. They lack many of the features of iContact, but they are reliable and well priced at $10 for 500- 2,500 contacts.

Pricier solutions:

Infusionsoft

-          Pros:

• Much more than just email marketing, a CRM (like Salesforce) allowing you to manage all contacts and leads
• Free trial
• Auto responders and auto reminders
• Ecommerce integration
• Extremely robust (can integrate via API with other solutions)
• Low learning curve for basic features
• Good customer service

-          Cons:

• Pricey
• Weak shopping cart
• Lacking functionality of other high-priced CRMs

-          Conclusion: Infusionsoft may be overkill for many small businesses, but for those small to medium-sized businesses that need a powerful CRM to manage sales, marketing, relationship management, invoices, tasks and much more it is extremely powerful. Infusionsoft allows you do everything from create landing pages to capture leads; store these leads, make notes, and schedule follow ups; tag leads for specific email marketing campaigns; and process credit cards once they become a client. They are higher priced than any of the other solutions in this article at $199/month for up to 10,000 contacts for their most basic package.

There are many different solutions available that can help your business with its email marketing. It is important to understand the exact needs of your business before making a decision. Never underestimate the power of a quality CRM to manage prospects, leads and customers. If you’ve done your research and found what you think is the right solution then sign up for the free trial (if available) and test out their customer service.

Turbo would like to know if you have experience (good or bad) with any of these solutions, or if you’ve had experience with email marketing solutions not mentioned here. Feel free to leave us a comment.

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If you ares till skeptical about all of this, then maybe you have not heard the big Super Bowl news. The Super Bowl is known as the #1 place for companies to spend their marketing budget. 30 second commercials can cost as much as $4 million! This year however, one of the biggest spenders on Super Bowl ads, has decided not to focus their money elsewhere. Pepsi, who is known for spending at least $20 million a year, just on Super Bowl ads, has decided that there is a better way to do this: Social Media Marketing. (Read More about it here)

Social Media Marketing is huge, so huge that one of the biggest companies int he world is focusing more time and money on just that. Sure if you put an ad on the super bowl, millions of viewers will see it, but for much less money, just as many people, if not more will also see it online. The Internet is huge, and Social Media marketing is a big piece of that. By Pepsi making this move, I will not be surprised if more companies follow this lead… might be a good idea for you to take a shot as well.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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In my opinion: No. Web design  and SEO are two separate categories that  do not really help one another. However one without the other is lost. What this means is, is SEO is not helped in any way by the design of the site, until the very end. SEO refers to process of optimizing your site to get as much traffic to the site, once they are there, it is up to the design to take over.

If your site is not eye catching or is a bit confusing you may have a hard time keeping people on the site, which renders all the work done by the SEO as useless. Meaning that they do not help each other but in the end one without the other is lost. Here are a few tips and ideas that will help out with your web design:

• Having an attractive website. Nobody wants to be looking at dull boring colors and no pictures or videos. Make it eye catching so users want to check out more.
• Have a clear Call-to-Action. Without a call-to-action, there is nowhere for anyone to go on your site; give them a purpose
• Do not get too complicated. Many times you find a site that is too busy and has way too much going on. This makes it very difficult to find what you are looking for.

So in the end, the actual design of your site may not do anything for SEO, but it will help the entire process for what you are trying to accomplish. Think of SEO and a good web design as a package deal: without the other one, there is not much of a point.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and SEO, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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No longer do you have to search through your twitter posts from friends and fans to find anything relevant to what you want. On Mixx everything can be categorized more efficiently, so everything you would want to know about is right in front of you.

The question is: Is this necessary? Does this help? In my opinion, yes this is a great step forward. This Tweetmixx dashboard is a great all-in-one tool that allows you allows you to do everything in one place, rather than having to go to different places to tweet, for saved searches, another to check out your friends’ links, search for news breaking topics, and yet another to see the most popular content on twitter.

As the email suggests “Tweetmixx turns Twitter into a content recommendation site, even if you don’t follow anyone.” it makes finding relevant information so much easier and connecting with your friends and fans a breeze.

The joining of these sites is a huge advancement in Social Media. So many of the Social Media sites out there offer so much but lack in other areas. One might be good for content sharing, while another is good for networking while a 3rd is great for viral videos. Tweetmixx is a bit ahead of its time as Social Media sites are still building steam, but do not be surprised if you see more joint ventures such as this in the future.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and Social Networking, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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DoFollow links and NoFollow links are code structures embedded into the link that tell Search Spiders (these “spiders’ crawl the internet when you type in a search and look for things such as this to pull up as related information) whether or not to count it or not in the search results. DoFollow links are counted and NoFollow links are not.

You might be wondering what the points of this are, I mean, who in their right mind would not want to take advantage of the SEO that comes with the DoFollow links. well there are three main reasons for this:

1. Paid Links. Google recommends you do this as it interferes with page rankings. You essentially pay for a higher rank, and they do not like this
2. When linking to major and popular sites. When linking to large sites such as Google, Yahoo or CNN, it does not make or break any power to your site, and just adds, cluster
3. NoFollow in comment sections. People often times take advantage of comments sections and put in a whole bunch of links. They get page ranking powers from this, which may overcome your site, it’s your own preference but again it is recommended.

If you are not too worried about any of the above information, then the DoFollow link is just right for you (technically there is no DoFollow tag, you just do not use the NoFollow HTML tag when editing and it works like a DoFollow

To learn more about Anchor tags, DoFollow and NoFollow Links and SEO Marketing, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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Is Social Media a fad? Don’t think so….

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And I will say to you that “You are right, we have talked much about SEO in a lot of our previous articles, but this is different.”

Search Engine optimization refers to the tactics of driving a lot of people to your sites through search engines. Your meta-data and keywords are geared towards getting high organic ranks in Google, and Bing and other search engines. Social Media Optimization (SMO), however, uses more than just the search engines to drive people to your site. SMO utilizes methods including social media buttons, RSS feeders, and blogs as well as incorporating in videos and pictures.

SMO is an amazing concept and if done well it can really help get more results to your site. SMO was conceptualized by Rohit Bhargava, where he drew many comparisons to SEO but separated the two, based on the variety of Social Media tools that could be used outside of Search Engines. According to Bhargava, the 5 rules of SMO are:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

All in all, SMO is basically an addition to Web 2.0, which incorporates all of these ideas and rolls them all up into 1 concept. The goal of all of this is to create a lot of buzz around your site and drive as much traffic as possible, int he hopes of creating more leads.

To learn more about Social Media Optimization for Business, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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As you may or may not know, I have a fair amount of experience in optimizing websites, and everything that we do with our social media marketing is setup to be picked up by the search engines with the hope of driving additional targeted traffic to our client websites.  Bottom line here is that if you are providing good content, and help the search engines index this content, then it should show up without a problem, regardless of the new algorithm.  Black Hat Optimizers beware!

So, I decided to do a little research, and test out some of our clients search results in Google’s Sandbox (their testing area).  You can try the new search technology here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com. Only the URL will tell you that you are on the test site.

What I found was as expected, my clients sites actually show up HIGHER in the rankings in the sandbox version than in the current version!  Why?  It’s simple, all of my client’s sites are optimized correctly and are not targeting keywords that are not relevant to the content on the page, AND, they blog consistently.  The fresh content from social media marketing requires that Google re-index the pages more often, making it seem as a relevant and great source of information.  So- are you ready for Caffeine, or are you going to have to re-think your SEO strategy.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing for Business, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give me a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Matthew Arndt, President, Turbo Social Media

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Content Sharing Through Social Media

We’ve often talked about how social media marketing is all about sharing great content.  The content is there for many reasons.  If you share, then you position yourself or your company as the expert in your industry.  You also gain visibility, and have the chance to have your content shared with others participating on the social web.  Your goal here should be to find one of the many different way’s of having your visitors subscribing to your updates, via an Email Opt-In, RSS Feed Subscription, having them “follow” your tweets, “friend” you on facebook, or “connect” with LinkedIn.

So, you’ve been successful with your sharing, you’ve built your following, and you’d like to promote an event now…but how?

Well, the usual response is to market directly to your list, by sending messages about it, but this needs to be done delicately.  Everyone can understand the power of reaching out to a list of fans, but with social media, this has often been abused.  In the marketing world, we do our best to connect with our market, but understanding the idea of giving to gain is the most important thing we can do.

OK, so I have to give, and I don’t want to abuse my list, but I still need them to come, how should I approach this?

Of course you need to send promotions, and that is fine, but there is a proper balance that needs to be respected when marketing through social media.   When doing a promotion, its important to share snippits of the content about the topic interspersed with the promotion.  Without this content, your followers will view you as a spammer instead of a friend.  Your followers want to trust what you are sending them, as well as have confidence in you, so make sure that you don’t over-do your promotion.

How do I know when I’ve overdone my promotion and when I hit my list’s breaking point?

The whole point of marketing with social media is the “pull” effect.  My friend Kelly O’Neil, the Marketing to the Affluent head coach from Marketing to Millionaires has told me that if you do your marketing correctly, then business flows to you without overdone promotions, price cuts, or advertising.  So you’ll know that your list is sick of it when the interactions on facebook, blogs, and twitter stop, your followers begin to unsubscribe, and business starts slowing down.  Its important to interact on a personal level at all times in order to have the maximum benefit from your social media marketing!

To learn more about Social Media Marketing for Business, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give me a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Matthew Arndt, President, Turbo Social Media

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One of the best ways to to get a prospect’s attention is by using a great Headline (otherwise known as a Teaser). The Headline is what draws people in, as it is the first thing people read and it is at the top of the page, “above the fold.” If the headline does not give any incentive to the reader, then why will they continue on that site or blog post?

Tell me what you think is a better headline:

“Jim’s Painting Service, Serving the Bay Area since 1925″
-or-
“Jim’s Painting Guarantees Timeliness, Cleanliness and a Paint Job that will last 10 years, and we’ll put that in writing!”

Which headline grabs your attention? Who are you more likely to call to get a painting estimate? Believe it or not, we see more people using taglines and headlines with “Since….19XX” than proper headlines in the majority of business websites. If you cannot come up with a few great reasons why a prospect should choose you over your competition, then why are you in business? There must be a few great reasons for prospects to do business with you.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing, fill out the form on the right to watch our free video series or give me a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

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