When people hear about SEO, most of the time they think about the sneaky tactics that SEO specialists do behind the back of search engines. Well, this is an antiquated view. Sure, some aspects of SEO have dwelled upon such sneaky tactics in the past but these are not the whole of SEO. These tactics are actually a dying form of SEO. Search Engines are fixing their flaws and are ultimately getting smarter.

But what does this have to do with the future of SEO?

This is just to make things clear. The future of SEO is not exactly an entirely different landscape from what we’re already looking at. The core concepts of SEO that have worked in the past are still working and will still work in the future. It’s just that it will get more streamlined and all the bad stuff will eventually die down.

 

So what are these core concepts of SEO?

Ultimately, it comes down to what users will want in a website. These are high-quality content, high-quality backlinks, a good site structure, and a little bit on page load speed.

1. High Quality Content – I know you’ve heard this before. I know it’s such a cliché but it has and will always be the main reason that users come to a site. If you have content that people want, search engines will respect that and ultimately reward your site with better rankings.
2. High Quality Backlinks – This comes down to Google’s roots where rankings were mostly considered from the number of sites that link to yours. It is basically a vote of confidence for your site similar to how university papers and journals cite other papers and journals that have quality content and are relevant to theirs. And when you get your links from trusted and high-authority sites, it will make your site even more attractive to search engines.
3. Good Site Structure – A good site structure is also a factor. Users normally wouldn’t spend time on a site that is confusing to browse through. This has led to search engine guidelines stating that there is a preference for sites with good site structure. Search engines crawlers are now smarter with the way they crawl through a site. If they find your site easy to crawl through, then it will reward your site with a higher ranking.
4. Page Load Speed – This is another factor that has always been the outcry of search engine guidelines. As long as your site provides sufficient page load speed that enhances the user experience, then people will prefer to stay on your site and search engines will certainly take a note of that.

These are the factors that will make a user come and spend time on a site. And search engines are steadily improving their algorithms to provide their users with sites that follow these factors.

The future is hard to predict but as the saying goes: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” With the dying down of blackhat/unethical SEO, these core concepts will be even more important and valuable.

 

How do I do social network marketing?

It’s a question that those looking to start or have already started an online business frequently ask… and rightfully so.

Social network marketing has become such an integral part of internet marketing that a lot of booming businesses and popular startups have literally started themselves from just one social network profile. But this isn’t to say that social network marketing is a simple activity that results in huge gains.

Though social network marketing can greatly improve the market awareness for your product, it takes a lot of time and effort to produce significant results. When we consider the number of businesses that have become popular with the help of this type of marketing, there are more that have failed trying. For businesses under a tight budget, the efficiency of their marketing process becomes all the more important.

There are a lot of resources all over the internet that teach people how to do social media marketing. But most of these are just theories and/or vague generalizations. The reality is that different types of businesses have different requirements and practice is very different from theory, all the more so in social network marketing where the people dynamic is the most important. In this article, we will reveal to you our own social network process in order to help people who just don’t know where and how to start.

Prelude

All social network marketing is done with social network profiles and if you don’t have your social network accounts yet create them right away. Create your accounts on all the major social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram.

For our own websites, we’ve only chosen the top 4 (http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites) social networks which are Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you are promoting products that are important for their visual appeal, be sure to also make use of visual-centric platforms such as Tumblr and Instagram.

It is important that your social media profiles provide as much information on your business as briefly as possible – and don’t forget to include a link to your website.

Making Friends

Here comes the tricky part. Your social network profiles are just as important as the number of people who like/follow you or are able to see and read your posts. What’s the use of your posts if only a few people will see them?

Social networks work on the basic premise of maintaining your real-world networks as well as create new ones. And since every social network starts with zero likes and follows, you need to subtly persuade tell your own contacts to like your page. You can start with your immediate relatives and most eager customers.

If you already have a handful of likes/follows, then you can start publishing your posts. Remember though that social media marketing is all about likes and the never-ending goal is always to get more and more likes/follows from potential customers.

Your primary tool for getting more likes/follows should be your published posts but it’s still important to complement this with strategies suited to each social network. Our system for getting new likes/follows is set up like this:

Facebook:

Like other fan pages that are in the same niche but are not direct competitors. This gives us a chance for them to like us back and create good social relations with them.

Twitter:

Follow a number of profiles that have the potential to follow back once a week. It may be tempting to follow 1000 profiles all at once expecting at least 100 to follow back but the people on Twitter have become especially wary of automated accounts run by bots. And a ratio of 1000 followed to 10 current followers is a definite red flag. Give them a chance to follow back before following another batch of profiles. You can also unfollow the profiles that didn’t like back before you follow another batch.

Google+:

This is where you can theoretically follow 1000 profiles and expect 100 to follow back. But we suggest to refrain from doing that. Unless you have a really large business operating to satisfy a number of consumer interests, it’s better to target who you follow depending on their connections and communities joined.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn offers a pretty good platform for looking up potential customers and business partners by searching for them by field e.g. landscaping. LinkedIn is best for finding B2B opportunities.

Disclaimer: If you’re in a niche market, gaining likes can be a slow and tedious process. The important thing to remember is to just keep on increasing your followers and likers even if you get to the point that you only get 1 new like/follow per week.

Disclaimer 2: Do not avail of any underhanded services like buying likes or follows. The goal is to get likes from potential customers, not from automated accounts.

Posts/Tweets

For the sake of simplicity, let’s just call it “posts”. And likers/followers as “followers”.

Now that’s a load off of my mind. Moving on.

There is that part where you get to market your brand to get more customers paying or to get new ones. But don’t just go ahead and spam your followers with mind-numbing ads. Never do this. First and foremost, remember that social networks are places where people interact with both old and new friends and acquaintances. Unless your followers are really dedicated fanboys or groupies, no one will appreciate you constantly promoting your own ass.

We have a system in place to publish one post per day, seven days of the week. The thing to remember about the posts is that they shouldn’t all be about promoting your products or service. Some posts should be created to create engagement, to provide information and some to provide entertainment. Talking about your products all the time is monotonous and will definitely come off as too corporate.

Social network marketing also gives businesses the opportunity to humanize their product to come closer to their customers. Publishing posts shouldn’t be all about you talking about your products, rather, it should be about you talking to your customers and creating a healthy conversation which isn’t always about your products.

But do we just log on to our social networks every day and check for updates every hour? Won’t it take too much time away from what really matters like closing deals?

If we have an efficient systemised process in place, then the answers are no and no.

This efficient systemised process entails us to create our social media posts ahead of time and schedule them accordingly in the social network profiles. We are using a 10-post template to create posts that are not solely for the purpose of self-promotion.

POST 1 (Promoting the company’s own products)
POST 2 (Inspirational quote related to niche)
POST 3 (Promoting the company’s own products)
POST 4 (Promoting another company in the same niche but not a direct competitor)
POST 5 (Informative post)
POST 6 (Promoting another company in the same niche but not a direct competitor)
POST 7 (Informative post)
POST 8 (Promoting the company’s own products)
POST 9 (Informative post)
POST 10 (Promoting another company in the same niche but not a direct competitor)

After the 10^th post, we rinse and repeat.

The next thing to consider is how we schedule these posts to our social networks automatically. We are using Hootsuite for our social networks but there are a lot of other tools to choose from like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. http://webtrends.about.com/od/pr6/tp/The-Top-10-Social-Media-Management-Applications.htm

After creating the social media posts in advance, we just need to feed these to our social media management app of choice. This process of creating and scheduling posts can be done weekly or bi-weekly so it will not take too much time.

Daily Management

For example, if you have a niche business with a pretty straight-forward website and only a few customers, then it’s sufficient to check your social network profiles once in every 2 days. But if you have time to spend, then it’s still better to check them every day. You don’t need to take too long to check them every day. An hour is usually more than enough to check for comments or messages that need immediate replies on all your social networks.

Then there is the other case, the type of business that attends to a lot of customers or frequently starts and closes their deals through social networks. The social network profiles can become a portal for inquiries and replying to these promptly is only good business sense. It promotes good relations with your customers which will ultimately mean more sales for your business. In this case, it is important to check the social networks daily or even to place someone in-charge with checking for and answering comments and messages.

Conclusion

The worth of social network marketing is at an all-time high and there are no signs of it slowing down. It is especially valuable to small businesses that can’t compete with the large companies in terms of advertising. All it takes for a small business to rise up the ranks is an effective social network marketing strategy coupled with an efficient social network marketing process.

We hope this article has helped you to refine your own social network marketing process. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment them below.

 

Training Requirement

If you are a prospective partner, it is important for you to know the skills of the people you are going to be working with. So in this article, I will discuss our training and skills development.

Nick requires that we devote 20% of our time on skills training and development. This allowed the team to not only become productive. It also sated each member’s natural desire to improve on their craft and learn new skills.

If you think about it, it is an ingenious plan – a win-win situation. For employees to be happy, they need to feel they are growing within the organization and that their skills and competencies are being put to good use. Contrary to popular belief, financial rewards actually only come secondary. For the business, it meant the employees are improving which makes them more capable of handling more diverse projects.

 

Magento Product Management

When I started working for Nick, he put me on trial for one month. I was like a young buck venturing for the first time in the wild. My first task was to write articles for him for one of his websites so he can assess my capabilities and that was finished without much of a hitch. Nick then decided to give me a task of adding products to the Magento e-commerce platform. That sounded overwhelming because I was not yet familiar with the platform but I was given a process to follow. I started with simple products, soon after I already found myself working on the more complicated grouped products and configurable products. After more than a year, I was not only limited to the product catalog tab in Magento. Currently, Nick already considers me an expert on Magento product management and sends me all the product related tasks for IOTA and GardenWare. He told me that:

…when you become an expert at something, you should stop doing it; train someone else to do it; and become an expert at something else.

Design

Currently, I am quite well versed in the WordPress content management system and working on nickj.co just furthered what I currently know about WordPress design elements. Still, it’s going to be a while before I am capable of creating a full-scale web design all on my own. There are still a lot of things that I need to grasp.

Learning how to code in different programming languages is going to be a very big challenge for me and it is interesting for me so that helps. For the time being, I have a few things I am polishing up my skills on. I am also learning the basics of programming which will prepare me for CSS or Javascript. I think Nick wants me to go into the direction of CSS which I think is the reasonable option since I deal with a lot of pages and learning how to manipulate CSS elements will help a lot.

Project Management

As project manager and team leader, it’s helpful but it isn’t really a necessity for me to gain a mastery of technical skills. I just need to at least grasp the core concepts to be able manage projects effectively. I kind of consider myself as being a little technical and a little creative. I am neither a master of the creative nor the technical aspect but I know enough of both to manage tasks effectively. Though I am trying to get my foot into the technical bandwagon.

Other training I had in the past year and a half included Google Adwords, SEO, project management, social media management, copy writing, Photoshop, Saasu, etc.

Search Engine Optimization

As for the other team members, John is furthering his know-how in SEO and social media.

Joan, or Jo as we call her, is the newest in the team and she actually fits in. Most of our recruits never make it past the trial period so I’m just glad so we got a new set of reliable hands on board. Among other stuff, she is working John on the SEO campaign.

I did also train myself on SEO by reading articles and watching training videos. I still keep up to date on the latest stuff about SEO by following some blogs and SEOmoz on the social media.

Motivating team members in a traditional workplace is a challenge in itself so you would imagine motivating team members in a virtual work space would be a lot harder.

Virtual Teams, MMORPGs, and Leadership – How They All Tie Up

I’ve read an article which relates how playing video games, MMORPGs in particular, can promote and build leadership skills that can benefit virtual teams. See it here. By the way, MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. To speak in layman terms, most games in this genre involve someone stepping up to be a leader of a guild or a faction composed usually of people who do not know each other from different parts of the world to perform a task which could be raiding an enemy camp, defeating an overly powerful enemy (which cannot be done alone), or defeating an opposing guild. Whatever the goal is, leadership and teamwork is important. Kind of like the same set up for virtual teams. This article details exactly what I mean: http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/19/career-leadership-strategy-technology-videogames.html

I like to excel in everything that I do. If I don’t excel I’d rather not do it at all actually and that includes my video games. I’ve had experience in leading a guild and a raid and I can say that guilds in MMORPGs are very similar to virtual teams. The leader decides which people he wants to recruit. The leader also decides who to promote to assume positions and responsibilities in the guild. He delegates tasks so that the guild can accomplish its set goals.

I was a gamer before I became a team leader and I do believe that the people management and resource management skills that I gained from playing video games, MMORPGs in particular, allowed me to become an effective leader.

My Approach in the Traditional Office Setting

Looking back, I was team leader in a traditional office before I worked with a virtual team. And as team leader, one of your main goals is to keep the team in high spirits so they keep performing well. During this time, instead of becoming the bossy type who just keeps giving out orders and shouts at every mistake, I reached out to my team. To begin with, I never was the kind of person who would shout at someone. I listen to the team’s concerns which I then communicate with upper management. I hang out with my team after work to get dinner or a beer. We chip in so we can order pizza during afternoon breaks. I even organize other out of office activities like paintball and bowling. In fact, my team had a reputation of being the tightest team in the entire department. Not only that, my team consistently and overly exceeded our monthly performance goals. My approach may not be the best approach but it’s the approach that worked for me.

At some point, management decided to provide pizza for the team that does the best for the entire month. The other teams stepped up their game but we still emerged victorious!

Nothing better than free pizza. Except maybe free bacon but you can get bacon on a pizza, so…

However, I think the danger in this approach is that your team members may treat you too lightly. You must be able to balance the professionalism and make sure that the team understands that it is not okay to fool around with work. When it’s play time, it’s play time. When it’s work, it’s serious work.

How I Approach the Virtual Team

In a virtual team, you make do with email communication, chat, and phone – no actual verbal communication. Limited communication can make building rapport a problem. Without good rapport, teamwork is hardly possible. Can you imagine working on an important project with someone who you do not know, much less trust?

As you may have guessed, the approach that I used in the traditional setting would not work in a virtual team so I have to improvise. Currently, what I try to do is to hold weekly Skype meetings initially to discuss work but later develop into greeting the team and asking how they are doing. At some point, I will ask if they have any concerns about work or anything. I found that this works to a great degree although I haven’t been able to do the meetings on a regular basis (which I know I should).

It is a good thing that there isn’t much of a time difference between Australia and the Philippines because we can hold meetings at a time that is usually convenient for everyone. Still, the lack of direct verbal communication can lead to misunderstandings. Sometimes, tasks can lead to undesired outcomes. The solution here is to define clear goals for each project and communicating this properly with the team. Creating clear project and task briefs is also invaluable.

The team that we have now is a good one although I think we can improve on our interpersonal communication. I will continue to strive for ways to achieve the same kind of relationship in the current team which could come in a future blog post.

One thing that still bothers me though is how we can get pizza and beer for the team. If you know how that could be done in the virtual team, let me know by all means! Also, share how you motivate your virtual team in the comments section.

 

Our team thrives in the virtual work space and while there are certain barriers in this kind of setup, I think we are doing really great. I have worked with Nick for a little over a year as of this writing and it’s not all fun and games.

Hiring the Right People

How we do things starts with getting the right people. We don’t hire people right off the bat just because they have an amazing résumé. I’ve seen some good people come and go just because they can’t keep up with the processes that we have in place. The first thing that we look at when looking for new team members is the IQ level. We make them take an IQ test. Why we need people with high IQ is pretty much self-explanatory. And because the tests are taken online, some people may be able to cheat but when work starts you can pretty much tell which ones cheated at the IQ test. Probably less than 25% of the people that we put on trial period are actually hired because most can’t keep up with the quality of work that we require and our “Golden Rules”. Heck, only about 5% make it past the IQ test score requirement.

After the testing part comes the interview which is much less formal than traditional job interviews. We do it through Skype chat. We still ask some of the common interview questions but in particular, we need to know if they can work uninterrupted at home.

If they have children someone should be able to look after their children while they are working.because you can’t be working while making your kid’s packed lunch. It simply doesn’t work.

On another note, educational attainment does not seem to matter because having a degree does not translate to intellectual superiority. Your work experience says more about what you can do compared to an over-glorified diploma.

The Reporting and Honor System

We thrive on a system based on honesty. We do not have a time tracking software in place. Instead we use an intensive reporting system on a daily, weekly, and bimonthly basis. This system has actually grown on me and I wouldn’t have it any other way. At the start of the work day, we email a report on what tasks we have on hand for the day. The day is capped with a report on what tasks we were able to accomplish. This report needs to be very detailed. It must include time stamps and results of tasks, suggestions, problems encountered, suggested solutions, etc.

Every Friday, we submit another report which is mostly a narrative of the week that was, including personal stuff and goals that we want to share. I treat it as a space where I can rant about anything related to work and home. I spend more or less an hour creating this report and some might think it a waste of time – that one hour doing this report should rather be spent on something more productive. However, as an online team, this helps us get to know each other better since we can’t really get together after office hours to get a beer or grab pizza.

Twice a month, we also submit a bimonthly report which is mainly a summary of accomplished projects and current projects, work schedule, among other things. The reporting system is actually evolving to adjust to our needs. The bimonthly report in particular had a couple of sections added to it.

Quality over Quantity

In our system, quantity is not paramount. Quality is our recipe for success. It doesn’t matter if you take a longer time to accomplish a task just as long as you do it perfectly.

If you do it fast, you are bound to make mistakes and most of the time, correcting these mistakes takes even more time and time is a very precious commodity. However, this does not necessarily mean that we can take our sweet time on every task. Taking way too long to accomplish a task is also not good.

Before submitting a task as accomplished, you must check that it is free from errors.

If you come across a problem when doing a task, don’t just raise the problem, propose a solution.

Skills development is also an important aspect in our system. Each team member is encouraged to spend at least 20% of his work day into learning new skills. That, to me, is a really good deal. I actually get paid to learn something new. Skills development and training is always a win-win situation.

Team Meetings

Also, every now and then, we have a team meeting over Skype to discuss some tasks but mostly just to reach out to the team members and see how they are doing or talk about any concerns that they have in mind. So, even if we don’t know each other personally, we become a tight group.

Nick actually went to the Philippines last year for vacation; it also became an opportunity for us to meet in person and discuss his future plans for the business and for the team, though it was a completely different team back then. Everyone else had come and gone except for me. I think I am probably the one who spent the longest time in Nick’s team.