Facebook is now a household name (especially for those with teenagers in the house) and as business owners become more aware of the effectiveness of using social sites to market their business, there are many frequently asked questions about how to put your business on Facebook.

Let’s start by noting the difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page.

Facebook Profile:

• Strictly for people (not a business or product) to interact with friends and family
• Any individual can create a profile, just not a commercial business or product
• A business that opens a profile page is in direct violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and will be disabled
• Other users become FRIENDS of a Facebook Profile
• A Facebook Profile can upload pictures, videos, status updates, and can invite people to become friends

Facebook Pages:

• Designed for businesses, brands, companies, products, and celebrities
• Other users become FANS of a Facebook Page
• Can upload pictures, videos, status updates, host a discussion board, display wall posts, and other features
• Can track metrics like fans, page views, interactions, gender, age, location, language, and more
• Can not invite other members to become a fan

Example of Facebook Page metrics:

The reason for keeping companies and individuals separate on Facebook is to reduce the amount of spam. If a business was able to invite you become a fan of their page, users would be flooded with businesses looking to inflate their number of fans.

The purpose is to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible. Sites like MySpace and Twitter do not have such strict boundaries between individuals and companies. This unrestricted access has contributed to the ongoing decrease in MySpace’s traffic and could lead to the death of Twitter if stricter rules are not put into place.

This points back to the first three rules of social media marketing:

1. Content
2. Content
3. Content

If you don’t provide interesting content with a positive experience for your readers and fans you will never achieve success in developing a strong online following. It wouldn’t be good business practice to cut corners in your trade, so it’s equally unprofessional to break social networking etiquette.

Questions? Comments? Let us know in the comment box below. Or contact us here.

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Understanding the value of keywords in online marketing and taking the relevant actions is the key to making significant profits in the industry. Understanding the power of keywords means picking the right keywords, leveraging them effectively and continuously reviewing their conversion rates.

Google is not an automatic money making machine on its own. The power of Google is in the keywords, not on Google itself. The reason that keywords are so important is simple. Keywords represent a custom built service for the Internet searcher. They ask the search engine for information on specific words and the information is returned to them. Hence the reason why the premium is attached to keywords.

The success of the online marketer is therefore linked to how well she leverages her keywords. She needs to plan them very carefully and do a lot of research. Picking effective keywords takes skill and patience. Acquiring the skill helps the online marketer remain calm under pressure.

To pick the right keywords, the online marketer must constantly watch for traffic and searches for the relevant words. If she is pursuing a cost per click advertising strategy, she must also ensure she is not paying over the odds to the point where the keywords are not delivering sufficient value to her business. To gain an indication of the value of the keywords, seek competitor information on what they are spending on the keywords.

It is also very important to note that loyalty to keywords based on an online marketer’s hunch is suicidal to her business. Over 90% of keywords lose money in cost per click advertising; therefore it is very important that the online marketer has management information on conversion rates for her keywords. She should quickly identify the ones that her making her money and ditch the rest as quickly as possible. This should be an ongoing review process as keywords do run their course. The online marketer should aim to spend the bulk of her advertising budget on around the best 5% of her keywords. This is how she can consistently make money.

Keywords and not Google is the key to making money in an online marketing business. Understanding the power of keyword leverage, being consistent and unsentimental in the use of keywords and picking the right ones are the keys to success in the industry.

Continue Reading »

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Blogging is important for your business, but it’s a waste of time if you don’t gather new visitors and generate interest. Routing traffic from search engines is especially important and these 9 SEO plugins below can help you accomplish that on your blog.

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Redirection
3. Robots Meta
4. SEO Smart Links
5. SEO Friendly Images
6. Google Positioner
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
8. Nofollow Case by Case
9. SEO Slugs

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Visit or website at ltwo.com or leveltwomedical.com
Plugin tips are from Problogger

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Perfection is not a business quality, it’s a goal. No one ever achieves it because you can’t make everyone happy. There are always going to be problems and conflicts. So with that in mind, it’s logical to understand that there will always be negative reviews for companies.

Your small business is built for customer interaction
What to do about a bad review
When to confront a negative review

Matt McGee over at smallbusinesssem.com has posted a great blog post that discusses why negative reviews are actually good for businesses. Below is an excerpt from his blog post.

How Negative Reviews are Good for Business

1.) They create trust. Negative reviews provide balance. No one expects a product or service to be perfect for every person. Negative reviews help customers confirm they can live with the product’s faults and/or the company’s faults.

2.) They provide honest feedback. Reviews of your product or service are a focus group of sorts; honest reviews tell you what you’re doing right and wrong. Rather than avoid negative reviews, use them to improve your products, services, or business processes.

3.) They can improve your SEO. You’ve probably heard that good keyword research and good copywriting involves targeting the terms that your customers use. Well, negative reviews offer a peak into how your customers talk about your business or products — the terms they use, the concerns they have, the places where there’s friction between what you advertised and what you delivered. There may be good keyword research and copywriting ideas in those negative reviews.

4.) They help you make better business decisions. If one of your products or services continually gets negative feedback from customers, that’s a strong hint that you should either make dramatic improvements in the product/service or just get rid of it altogether. If patients love how you take care of them, but repeatedly say your waiting room is too small or too loud, it’s probably time to make some facility improvements.

5.) They offer a golden opportunity. A negative review is an opportunity for you to shine, to show you care about making things better — not only for the customer who left the negative review, but also for the countless others that are reading.

Read Matt’s entire blog post here at smallbusinesssem.com.

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We’ve discussed Twitter a lot on this blog, but there are a lot of other social networks that have some great reach and interactive features to help get your business and services to as many people as possible. I’ve been doing some testing on Friendfeed and I’ve been enjoying the service more and more.

As Twitter continues to have stability issues, Friendfeed is a great environment to distribute your content to people you are interested. The big difference between the two sites is that Friendfeed will aggregate all of your social channels into one place. So as you post pictures on your Flickr account and videos to your YouTube account your Friendfeed profile will display all of your activity in one central place.

BONUS TIP:
So if you don’t have a blog, here’s a great tip. Use your Friendfeed widget on your website to display the latest activities that your business is doing online. Just go to http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget and customize your widget to fit your website’s theme. You now have a centralized hub for all of your social media marketing displayed neatly on your website.

Subscribe to the LEVELTWO Friendfeed here.

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Somebody’s finally done it. The internet is now complete. Sears, in partnership with AOL News, has created Good News Now, GNN.com.

I think it’s a great way to share some positive headlines in a news market that is flooded with depressing topics and stories about failure. With headlines about seven leaf clovers, inspiring stories, and slideshows loaded with cute pictures like newborn twin black panther cubs, GNN seems like a great way to harvest a large amount of traffic and maintain a strong and positive branding campaign.

And on a particularly creative twist, they even have a weekend countdown timer!

Visit gnn.com

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Yesterday was a big day for Mac and iPhone users. Apple hosted its annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and announced the latest updates to their wildly popular iPhone. While the majority of the opening keynote was focused on updates to the Apple products, they did allow some time for featured developers to discuss their latest technologies using the iPhone.

A very exciting presentation was done by AirStrip Technologies. They made medical devices and their presentation at WWDC 09 was about AirStrip Critical Care which delivers real time information to practitioners like ventilator flow tracings, patient vital signs data and rhythm strips.

The medical industry is flocking to the tech market and applications like this are a glimpse into the future of healthcare. Patients are looking for their healthcare providers to take steps toward advanced technologies. It’s important that your medical company show its strong commitment to staying current and valid in today’s dynamic market.

While you may not have the ability to create your own medical technologies, there are other ways to establish a presence of innovation and we can help you do it.

We specialize in:

• creating integrated marketing campaigns that include TV, radio, print, outdoor and interactive
• developing surgical cases for healthcare facilities, surgical centers and surgeons
• ensuring your staff effectively captures and tracks leads
• patient generation for individual physicians and physician groups
• website development
• pay-per-click (sponsored keywords) to drive targeted leads
• natural/organic search engine optimization to drive targeted leads
• powerful social media tools that capture grassroot leads doing research on the web
• results that are quantifiable by our proprietary software tracking and CRM system

Find out more at LEVELTWO Medical.

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While millions of users twitter away details about what’s happening in their life, you can use Twitter to market your product and services to customers in your area.

We’ve put together a list of some online and mobile tools you can use to search, find, and interact with people in your area.

1. Twitter Search
   You can use the advanced search function built into Twitter. We wrote a detailed how-to back in March. “Twitter tools for those who don’t have an iphone.“
2. Social Meetup
   While you can make an impression on the internet, you can really gather a lot of new contacts and leads by attending a meetup that is organized online. A group of people that are interested in the same topics will schedule and plan to meet to discuss their common passion. Here’s two great places to find a meet up in your company’s industry:
   – Tweetup Meetup – http://tweetup.meetup.com
   – Twtvite – http://twtvite.com
3. iPhone Apps
   If you have an iPhone there are several apps that can provide you with geo-locating tools.
   – Twinkle
   – Twitterfon
   – Twittie
   – Twittelator
4. Non-iPhone Tips
   TwitterLocal is similar to the advanced Twitter search, but you are able to manage your local Twitter feeds directly from your desktop using their free software. It’s basically a free way to do what the iPhone apps provide.
5. LocalTweeps
   It’s a local Twitter directory. You can use this local twitter directory to find and interact with users in your area. Since it is based on zipcode and not on city names your listings and searches can be much more specific. Other similar services include:
   – NearbyTweets
   – happn.in

If you found these tips useful, please consider subscribing to our blog via RSS or email. You also follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates.

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Let’s be honest. The biggest criticism of Twitter is that day-to-day it really doesn’t live up to all the hype that it’s been getting in the news. While it is a great business marketing tool, a lot of the famous celebrity tweets end up being a little boring or anticlimactic for all the time that the news media devotes to talking about them.

Conan O’Brien recently made light of this twitter stereotype on The Tonight Show with his Twitter Tracker.

We don’t want to mislead anyone about Twitter. It really is simply a mass messaging system. At it’s core, that’s as complex as it gets, but within that simplicity, that’s where Twitter gets its popularity.

By taking a complex issue, say for example your business, and explaining it in 140 character messages is a lot easier for people to digest. Short messages can be more powerful and more effective than an essay.

Got something to say? Say to @LEVELTWO

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About a month and a half ago @aplusk reached 1 million followers on Twitter and now just about a month and a half later he has reached over 2 million followers.

The Ellen Show has really increased it’s followers over the past 3 months and now is just behind Ashton by only about a quarter of a million followers, which is really not that much.

So all of this push for online social dominance tells us 3 things about the future of Twitter:

1. It’s popularity is universal.
   The demographics of Ashton, Ellen, and CNN fans is an extremely wide range. This tells us that the social landscape is important and vital to many different generations of people. No one demographic represents the Twitter audience.
2. It’s a great tool for communication.
   If major networks take time from the shows to voice their interest in social networks like Twitter then it is surely a valid tool for other smaller industries. In other words, it’s not for the other guys, you can make use of it too!
3. It’s going to be around for a while.
   With thousands of people joining Twitter on a daily basis, it basically assured that social networks like this will be around for a long time. It’s not a passing phase or a trend.

If you are interested in setting up a social media campaign for your company contact us or use the form here.

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