Multiply Your Online Presence with Chiclets

No, I'm not talking about the gum! In the online marketing world, a chiclet refers to a small, square icon that usually indicates and RSS feed or another way to share or bookmark the content on a webpage. As I was building our website, http://www.tuscaloosaonlinemarketing.com/, I knew that I wanted my visitors to be able to subscribe to my blog, but I also wanted them to be able to bookmark the content and share it on their favorite social networks. This way, my visitors themselves would be helping to promote my content for me.

Not only is this a great way to build buzz, or word-of-mouth, it's a great way to increase your search engine rankings! Why? Because every bookmark on del.icio.us and every share on Facebook and every tweet on Twitter is SEARCHABLE. When Google sees these bookmarks and shares, it say, "Wow! Real people think this content is valuable enough to share with their friends." In essence, your users "vote" for your website's content, and Google takes that into consideration in the future when people search for content like yours. Which means more people find you, and hopefully "vote" for you, etc., etc., etc.! You can see how this could potentially become a huge snowball effect - assuming you've got content worth sharing!

So, ok - back to chiclets. Chiclets make it easy for your visitors to share your content with one easy click. But how do you add all the possible chiclets without making your page look like a stamp collection? That's where http://www.addthis.com/ comes in. They make a quick and easy solution that includes literally DOZENS of possible chiclets in one small, attractive piece of code that is SUPER easy to install. You'll find add this links on many major websites like http://www.ew.com/. So, there's a good chance that your visitors have already seen add this widgets on other pages and already know what to do with them on your page!

Chiclets are just one small piece of the online marketing puzzle, but they can make an enormous difference! What are your thoughts? Comment below...

The Moment of Relevance

I was recently at the University Continuing Education Association Annual Marketing Seminar in Scottsdale, AZ. At the conference, Stefan Tornquist of Marketing Sherpa talked about online marketing in terms of "The Moment of Relevance." This idea really resonated for me.

So, what is the moment of relevance? It's that special moment in time when a consumer is searching for a specific product or service - one that YOU offer. The science and art of online marketing is about making certain that your product/service comes up when the consumer searches the internet. That sounds easy enough, right? Wrong.

There are a lot of factors to consider:

• Have you optimized your site for search engines? In other words, have you found out what keyword phrases your customers are typing into Google at their moments of relevance, and are you then making sure that those keywords are well represented in your title, description, and page-text? Is it working?
• Are you running a paid search campaign on the search engine that the consumer has chosen to use? Google has over 60% of the market share, but if you're only on Google, you could be missing out on 40% of your potential consumers?
• Is your site attractive, functional, and up-to-date? If any of these are missing, it could mean missing a moment of relevance?
• How are you interacting with your customers? Are you available for a live chat? Do you talk to them on your blog? Are you taking advantage of the many other ways to get noticed online like squidoo.com?

These are just a few of the many things to consider to capitalize on "The Moment of Relevance." What other ideas do you have?