Pinterest, when used correctly, can drive valuable traffic to your website, promote your brand recognition, and increase conversions. In fact, according to HubSpot, as of January, 2012, Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic. Shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to make a purchase than visitors arriving from other social networks, and are likely to spend 10% more.

Read on to learn how your brand can cash in on the Pinterest phenomenon:

1. Include images on every page and blog post

Pinterest is image-based; if a page doesn’t have an image or photo on it, no one will be able to pin it, no matter how interesting the article is. And, the more interesting/thought-provoking/funny/unique/artistic your images are, the more likely people will pin and repin them, giving your site the exposure that you’re seeking.

2. Claim your brand or business name

Or if it’s already taken, find one that’s as close to it as possible. Because Pinterest is indexed by the search engines, the closer you can match your Pinterest URL to your brand’s name, the better for your business’ findability. It will also make it easier for other Pinners to find you just by searching in the on-site search box.

3. Optimize your account

Take advantage of Pinterest’s profile features; add links to your other social profiles and website. Complete your bio, using keywords in the description.

In the pin and pinboard descriptions, use hashtags so that they’re easily found, and include a website URL in pin descriptions where it makes sense. Don’t forget to include relevant keywords in the actual descriptions themselves. Some well-branded or optimized pinboards are ranking well in the search engine results pages. Read more…

If you don’t know about Twitter chats, or you have never participated in one, you’re missing out. Twitter chats are scheduled discussions that happen on a regular basis – usually weekly. They’re set up by a moderator and each chat usually has a loosely set topic to keep participants on track. Moderators sometimes ask a feature guest to participate; this is usually someone in the industry that people will jump at the chance to ask questions of.

If you’re new to Twitter chats, be prepared to be overwhelmed the first few times you attend. Depending on how popular a particular chat is, it can be virtually impossible to keep up with everything that’s being said. That’s exactly why most moderators will record the chat and make a transcript available shortly afterward.

Here’s why we love Twitter chats:

Make new connections

Twitter chats are the perfect way to network with others who are in your field or have similar interests. Read more…

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a single place that offered insightful, useful tips on all of the social platforms we love? Well now there is. It’s called SocialMediaTips.com. The site was launched (by us!) this week. It is based on a crowd sourced model and will allow anyone who logs in the ability to leave their own tips on a variety of popular social media platforms.

What’s so Great about Social Media Tips?

Tips are Current

Isn’t it frustrating when you try and figure out how to do something, and you come across how tos that were written several years ago? Irrelevant social media tips are everywhere and are not helpful. This site will allow people to flag out of date information and post their own updated tips. Read more…

Is there really something better than link building? It should, after all, only be a piece of your inbound marketing strategy. The fact is you still need to generate backlinks and you need to maintain a consistent link velocity (the rate at which you acquire links). StepForth has recently moved from offering professional link building services to something we like to call Better than Link Building. It’s a change that we’re all pretty excited about..

Better than Link Building is a way to actively engage with your company’s target audience, build brand recognition, monitor and respond to your niche, all while building natural backlinks.

Here are the problems with traditional link building methods: Read more…

I have been working with an organization called Elephants Never Forget for the past few months helping them raise awareness on the plight of Asian elephants; StepForth takes a great interest in assisting charities and non-profits with marketing and this is my project. In order to gain interest and increase their numbers on Facebook, I’ve stuck to the following 4 key tactics that have proved to be quite successful. Below outlines the specific tactics I used. These relate directly to our campaign; however the principles can be used for any page working to build their fans. Read more…

I have always been fascinated with how fast things can spread on social media and how this can be used for social good. Recently a campaign has exploded online which I’m sure you have heard of by now – Kony 2012. It’s a campaign put on by the Invisible Children, a non profit organization in the US. They’ve sparked this campaign through a 30 minute video (see it embedded below). The video has only been out since Monday and its unbelievable what has come of it. As of Wednesday night they had over 15 million views (that’s only 3 days of it being online) with their YouTube and Vimeo video combine. And they’ve got people talking! Opinions are flying, sharing and liking and tweeting are going crazy in the social sphere. Read more…

At the most recent Victoria Web Marketing Meetup we had a full house as Gil Namur, President and Creator of the popular ezine LifeasaHuman.com presented his secrets behind building his successful website. The reason Gil was chosen to speak was because our Meetup membership showed great interest on WordPress and he had a mountain of knowledge to share after creating LifeasaHuman.com on the WordPress platform using StudioPress and taking it from zero traffic to 200,000 Quantified visits per month (add 30% to get a more accurate number says his tests).

In addition, I know Gil personally and was convinced he would give a great presentation and indeed he did. To that end, you can view his presentation in all its glory below. Read more…

The top web browser at this moment, otherwise known as the browser with the most market share online, is easily found using some really handy and freely available tools which I have listed starting a few lines below. That said, why bother?

What is the use of knowing what browsers are the most popular?

Browser compatibility is usually the reason. You see every website created by a developer worth his/her salt will be cross browser compatible at the time it is launched; meaning it will look great on all of the top browsers at that time. The key point here is “it will look great at that time“; as a site gets older Internet technology does not stay the same and browsers are often upgraded which can leave once decent web sites looking lackluster or possibly broken when viewed in the latest browsers. In addition to enhancements in browsers causing problems, you could also be faced with an entirely new browser in the marketplace gaining massive traction (i.e. Google’s Chrome browser) which happens to render your website in ways you never intended.

TIP: If you are creating a business plan and trying to find out what web browser your  target market will be using then try viewing the browser data on Quantcast.com for a few websites which closely resemble your anticipated website; you may find other information in the reports helpful as well! Quantcast offers this information free but often times the data is estimated and not the most reliable – in those cases either keep looking for a site that is “Quantified” (logo on footer of page) at which point the data will be highly accurate or settle with the data you have.  There are other ways to get this data but I will leave that for another article; contact me if you wish for more details.

Read more…

Google announced earlier in the month that they will be making some changes to their quality score algorithm. They say that overall relevance and the quality of your destination URL will contribute more to your quality score than in before.  For the last 5 or so years Google has been making many changes to their quality score algorithm in regards to how much weight is appointed from the destination URL. The more relevant the landing page, the better the quality score resulting in a better performance from your account.

What will this do for My AdWords Account?

As long as you have been using relevant and quality destination URLs for your display ads, you should have nothing to worry about regarding your paid search account. Google says that relevant landing pages may even see a ‘strong boost’ when it comes to your display ads quality score. Read more…

Have you ever wondered how viewers respond to a particular movie or commercial? Does it retain an audience or do people leave straight away? Wouldn’t it be useful to know specifically what parts of a movie or commercial are popular so that your next video posting can be better than your previous?

Within my own company, Applied Brain and Vision Sciences, we use StepForth’s web marketing savvy and tools like YouTube and Google Analytics to help us direct our own marketing approaches and help us identify market opportunities for technology development. One of the distinct advantages of having StepForth house my own company is our physical proximity to each other; there is a wonderful on-going cross-pollination of ideas and know-how.