Blog

Marketing Mud had a great time presenting to the Greater Gainesville Unit of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) last night.  We spoke about affordable promotional items that massage therapists can use to promote their services and practices and discussed how they can use social media to improve client relationships and business.  The attendees were so impressed with our information that they have scheduled an in-depth 3 hour Facebook workshop with us on June 21st and are offering spots for 10 of their members to sit down with us and learn the ins and outs of Facebook for their businesses.  We will also discuss Twitter and HootSuite as a part of our workshop and how to automate updates and link Twitter and Facebook.  

Nancy Keeny Smith, LMT, MLD, NCTMB, Vice Chair for the chapter said, "What a wonderful presentation last night by April and Farrah from Marketing Mud. Discussion centered around great, affordable promotional items for your business and how to master social networking for your small business. We kept them late asking question after question so hats off to the ladies for being so patient!"

For a copy of our presentation you can visit our LinkedIn profile and join our network!  

The Builders Association of North Central Florida (BANCF) hosted their annual Family Fun Fishing Tournament last weekend. It was the 46th annual event for BANCF but Marketing Mud's first year to be involved in a great weekend of family fun. BANCF is a well-run association full of great support and opportunities for it's members as well as loads of fun and this weekend was no exception!

As a BANCF member, Marketing Mud is able to form partnerships with many fellow association members. We were specifically proud to be a part of the Fishing Tournament Committee as well as work with members to provide branded give-a-ways to place in the participant event bags. Marketing Mud also used it's creative talents to design the annual Fishing tournament shirt. This year the fish of choice was a cobia and the cobia shirt turned out to be a hit with the tournament participants! The cobia has not been caught in that tournament for a few years now and we would like to think we brought a little cobia luck to the day because a beautiful cobia was brought to the weigh-in!

Marketing Mud is extremely proud of the relationships we can build with our clients. As a team we are involved with many fun activities and associations and the BANCF Family Fun Fishing Tournament proved to be a great weekend for all involved!

Greetings Marketing Mud Fans!  My name is Nate and I design websites for Marketing Mud.  With the launch of our new website, and the amount of questions we have been receiving on the topic, I thought I would share my 2 cents regarding getting your page ranked higher in Google.  Whether you have a simple static HTML website, or a dynamic Content Management System (CMS) driven website, your goal will be the same.  You want to get people to your site!  As a web designer, one of the most common questions I get is "How do I get my page to the top of Google?".  While it can be a simple thing to do, it just doesn't happen overnight.  I am here to share my experience and opinions on the subject.  The most important thing to know is that Google is smart.  It doesn't fall for the old tricks anymore.  In fact, most of the old tricks now will have the opposite desired effect on your site.  Use only relevant keywords on your site, avoid hidden links and automated traffic, etc. Trust me, this is a good thing for everyone.

There seem to be many different opinions on how to climb google's rankings.  For a large part, exactly how google sees everything is a mystery, however with the varying opinions, there always seems to be 3 constants.  From my experience, these are the 'Big 3' things to concentrate on when getting your page to display at the top of search engines.:

• Relevant Content and Meta data:  Use keywords that are unique and relevant.  Title your pages according to the content, and location (if offering a service).  There are different ways to use keywords depending on the type of site you are building.  If you are using a CMS, incorporate extensions that will embed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Friendly URL (SEF) automation within each page of the site.  If you are building a static HTML site, concentrate on using unique and relevant verbiage directly within the content, and manually title your pages.  When you are entering in the meta data and content into each page, think of relevance to the user, rather than relevance to search engines.  Your page will benefit accordingly.  A steady increase in relevant traffic is worth a lot more than an immediate increase in non-relevant traffic.  Flooding your site with keywords that dont have any relevance will hurt your site, not help it.

• Linking: Think of the web as exactly that, a 'web'.  The more parts of the web you are connected to, the more sturdy the foundation to build on.  Getting linked from other established sites is perhaps the most significant way you can help your site quickly.  The more sites that link to you, the more search engines will crawl through your web.  Link swapping with partner sites is beneficial, however being directly linked from a site with no link backs is even better.  Be careful though, you only want to be linked from relevant/legit sites.  If you are linked from a 'spam site', it will affect your site adversely.  Google calls these sites 'bad neighborhoods'.  You want to keep your site part of a good neighborhood.  Picture a sites users, and if they can benefit from being linked from this site.  While just being linked is helpful, its the traffic that follows that link that is the real benefit.  Often times sites will charge for space on their pages.  If you are on a budget, social networking sites are a great free resource.  You are limited to your inner 'network' through them however.

• Time:  Think about just how many pages there are on the web.  Thousands upon thousands of websites are built all the time just to serve a very short term purpose, or used as pure spam.  If google would feature all these sites, search engines would be useless.  Establishing your website over a long time period is essential.  When these search engines see a website that has been established for a significant amount of time, with constantly updated relevant content, your standing with search engines will improve.  This is why you don't see your page on Google's front page the week after you go live. 

By following these tips, and targeting your audience (rather than search engines) your ranking will improve.  Submitting your site to google will speed up the process a bit.  It serves as mainly a request to send Google's 'spiders' through your site to start the ball rolling.  Submitting a sitemap through google webmaster tools will let google know the structure of your site, and ensure full coverage.  If you are a business, entering your site into google as a business listing is great as well, you will get tagged on google maps, and will come up in local searches.  Be weary of websites offering to help increase your traffic.  Often times, they will just generate automated queries to your website.  This may show you higher #s in your tracking software, but that traffic is useless to you, being non-human.  Google even advises against it in their guidelines.  They can see where this traffic is coming from, and they can see this traffic is used to spam sites.  This will affect your site adversely.

At Marketing Mud, we enable SEO and SEF extensions in all of our CMS web pages, and we are always on hand to help guide and advise our clients with Search Engine Optomization.  

How often do we hear, “follow us on Twitter”, or “become a fan of us on Facebook” at the end of television commercials or radio advertisements?  Every website we visit, every blog we read, and even when we shop online, we see the infamous Twitter or Facebook logo.  Social media has become such a huge part of our daily lives on a personal level and is now reaching the marketing and business world exponentially.  Typically we see larger companies, such as Dell or Starbucks publicizing their social media presence, but can social media work for the small business that you have built in your community?

Your small business is very much a reflection of your community.  It is usually formed by a person or group of people who are passionate about something and typically grows via honest business practices and word of mouth.  Social media is very similar in this respect in that it is all about creating a relationship and sharing ideas within a community with similar interests and needs.  Like any business and marketing venture, success doesn’t happen overnight with a social media campaign.  It comes with finding your target audience, talking to them, and most importantly, listening to what they have to say about your brand and what they need.

The social media world can seem pretty overwhelming and time consuming for the average business person.  With Facebook boasting more than 400 million active users, more than 1.5 million business fan pages, and more than 20 million people becoming fans of these pages each day, it is easy to see why a business owner might be overwhelmed when faced with the idea of entering the social media world.  But, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the overwhelming statistics that the social media revolution boasts.

There are over 2 million blogs in the blogosphere, and 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations from blogs and online forums, which illustrates that people are making purchasing decisions based on user-generated content and reviews.  What is the buzz about your brand?  Are people talking positively or expressing dissatisfaction with your services and products?  Either way, it is clear that the way to find out is by joining the conversation and engaging with your customers through intentional, consistent, and creative use of social media.

*Statistics courtesy of Facebook and Socialnomics.net.