posted by Amir

In many ways, the explosion of social network marketing has mirrored the growth of search engine optimization just a few years ago. Both are focused around content, both change the ways that businesses can attract new customers (not to mention the philosophy behind those methods), and both are largely considered necessary for any company with an Internet presence.

In fact, given that they are coming so closely related, you might be wondering: are search engine optimization and social media marketing still different topics?

The short answer is that they are... but only just so.

At the moment, SEO is a lot like commercial real estate. You might start out at a remote location, but through the careful investment of time and effort, you can steadily move your business into a high traffic, high profit neighborhood in a relatively short amount of time. It's still one of the most cost-effective ways of finding new customers, and the process that often takes on a life of its own once you've got it moving.

Social network marketing, on the other hand, closely resembles networking events in the off-line world. Approach them the wrong way, and you'll quickly find yourself stuck in a mixer with low-level marketers talking endlessly about products nobody wants. But open the door with the right kinds of content and profiles, and you can slip behind the velvet rope and talk deals with the movers and shakers. In other words, social networking is a great way to meet individual decision-makers – rather than a horde of "generic" customers – as well as deepen relationships with your existing buyers.

Search engine optimization and social network marketing definitely overlap, and the two are inching closer to one another all the time. For now, however, they are still separate disciplines that yield separate results. But even though you might have to spend a little time on each one, both are great ways to bring new business into your company

posted by Mark

Recently, we posted an article pointing out that YouTube – with more than a billion daily hits – had effectively become the world's second-largest search engine. But as much as we'd love to take sole credit for the idea, it seems that we aren't the only ones who noticed.

It’s difficult to find solid numbers, but estimates suggest that users are adding more than 200,000 new videos every single day, or about 13 hours worth each minute. While lots of those undoubtedly involve house pets dancing to modern hits, many of the new additions are coming from savvy online marketers just like you... and the trend is only gaining strength.

Here at Blue Beetle, it reminds us of something.

It wasn't that long ago that regular old search engine optimization was the hot new thing. Companies had just started figuring out that fresh content was the key to working your way to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing), and so they got into a mad rush to add articles to their websites. In many cases, this was a great thing, because it brought valuable information to the Internet. But just as often that meant marketers who were trying to make a quick buck posted poorly-written collections of key words they called articles, making it difficult for searchers to actually find the useful pages they were looking for.

The same thing is beginning to happen on YouTube. For all of the wonderful advice and entertainment that has already been uploaded, we are starting to see badly-produced videos coming from marketers looking to take shortcuts. A few of them might find a way to make money from this strategy, but it's bound to fail in the long term because people don't go online looking for junk—they're searching for quality advice and insight.

With that in mind, we are going to tell you something you probably already know: the goal of your video marketing campaign shouldn't be to have the most YouTube videos, but the most effective. Post material that educates and entertains, not clips that take up a few minutes while parroting your sales message again and again.

One good video on YouTube can bring you millions of views and thousands of new customers, but a badly done piece only costs everyone time and aggravation.

posted by Khurram

If you've worked with Blue Beetle recently, there's a good chance the topic of "usability" has come up more than once. That's because, like many of our counterparts, we believe it's a trait that no serious online marketer can afford to ignore – in the same league as search engine optimization or compatibility across different browsers.

Most clients understand this intuitively: the easier it is for people to move around your website and find what they're looking for, the more likely they are to decide to do business with you. The difficulty isn't in seeing the value of usability, but putting it in practice.

What's needed is a way to add features to an existing online platform, without having to sacrifice speed and performance for your visitors.
As it turns out, there is a tool that does exactly that. It's called AJAX, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While I'm sure that clears up the issue for those of you who spend your leisure hours looking through web design articles, maybe I should point out that in the real world, that basically means that AJAX allows your website to run more like a desktop application would – cleanly and seamlessly by displaying portions data dynamically, instead of refreshing the entire page when loading new data from the server.

The result isn't just an improvement in usability... it's a whole new chapter. By changing content and adding resources as your visitors input information, AJAX lets them read, shop, and navigate with a level of data and responsiveness that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.

For your website to be helpful to your visitors – not to mention profitable for you – it needs to have a high level of usability, and there's no better way to achieve that in this day and age than using AJAX.

posted by Mark

New website for Coastal Mountain Excavations (CME), a Whistler based heavy construction company is live. The inspiration for the design was drawn from the companies awesome location and with some funky Google Maps integration we delivered a website that showcases their projects and expertise quite effectively, even if we do say so ourselves.

posted by Mark

If television and movies have taught us anything about history, it's that the old American West was a place "without law." Drinking, gambling, and gun fights in the street were the symptoms of towns that seemed to have sprung up from nothing – the result of a mad gold rush that attracted entrepreneurial types from all over the world.

While the idea of saloons full of marshals, cowboys, and horse thieves might be overplayed for entertainment value, the concept of places being built from nothing actually gives us an interesting parallel to the development of the online business community. In the first days, there were sparse settlers setting up shops in camps at any URL they could find. Over time, though, areas have become crowded, complex communities have formed, and yes, laws are coming.

In this case, we aren't talking about political laws, but accepted standards of the way sites should be designed and arranged. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group of designers and consultants, is moving towards a set of universal guidelines that would serve as a kind of guide to best practices in layout and coding.

This might seem like a bit of a reach, given that the online community can be ferociously independent, but it actually represents change in a good way.

Just as laws and standards eventually came as a relief to the American West – few people enjoyed the prospect of being shot in Cheyenne or Abilene – uniform standards on the web will make pages safer and more accessible for everyone. By creating a handful of common tools, they mean that pages from all parts of the world will become easier to find and use by anyone, regardless of their hardware, operating system, or local provider.

Why should you care? Because usability is a close cousin of profitability; the more people who can view and navigate your site, the more potential buyers you can reach effectively. As more and more communities go online, and next-generation mobile devices spread like wildfire, WC3 standards are going to help smart marketers expand their reach.

The "law" might not be coming to the web, but standards are. Making your site work within them might not be mandatory, but it is going to be a good business decision.

posted by Khurram

In some ways, it seems like the Internet has been with us forever. It’s easy to forget that in the midst of our increasingly virtual world, your website might be the first – not to mention last and only – point of contact for an interested customer or colleague. A company with a poorly constructed home page, or one that doesn’t accurately reflect their vision, goals, or unique selling propositions, no longer has anywhere to hide… or anyone to hide behind.

In the “old days,” a smiling face at the front counter or a friendly voice on the phone could be enough to seal the deal. Business was all about relationships, and marketing materials, early websites included, were usually secondary to the people you employed. Now, strategies have changed slightly. Relationships still matter, but they are increasingly built from initial online impressions.

That seems obvious when you stop to think about the ways people use the Internet, but it has some heavy implications for your home page design and message. If you’re going to engage someone to interact with you in some way – and what business site isn’t designed to gather leads, sell products, or promote a message? – then it had better convey some key pieces of information, namely: who you are, what you do really well, and how you can help the visitor, direct from the home page.

What’s more, that information needs to be obvious and accessible, regardless of what type of browser or device they’re coming to you from. If your home page isn’t loading correctly, that’s a problem.

A shortcoming in any of these areas is going to result in a miss; the reader is going to surf along and find what they’re looking for on a competitor website. Wasted visitors are the equivalent of wasted time, wasted money, and a potentially large number of wasted future sales.

posted by Mark

Social networking is every online marketer’s favorite new toy, and that’s a good thing… mostly. After all, anything that lets you find new customers, improve your search engine positioning, and possibly even spread your message virally is going to be a useful tool. And really, that’s why it’s at the top of so many experts’ “must try” lists for 2010.

It’s that last bit that gets us in trouble.

The second the majority of us brand any idea as something you need to try, there’s a temptation to feel like you… well, need to try it. While that’s the wrong idea to approach to take to any marketing effort, it’s especially true with social networking.

The beauty of working with blogs, as well as sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others, is that they allow for a kind of informal give-and-take. In other words, they let you reach behind the curtain a little bit and engage your customers in a friendlier way.

The quickest way to ruin that is by coming at them with something that's boring – or worse, overtly commercial. And yet, that's exactly what tends to happen once you start to treat social networking like just another item on your "to do" list. Your posts and ideas become more and more stale, until all that's left is a steady stream of fluff that few people would actually take the time to read.

With that in mind, think of social media the right way: as a tool for engaging customers in spreading the word about your company in a semi-personal way. Don't treat it like an ongoing press release or just another piece of business communication – the moment it becomes uninteresting to you, you'll start giving that impression off to the buyers you're trying to attract.

posted by Mark

Search engine optimization, like any facet of online marketing, is a little bit harder than it looks. Just when your company has gotten its site to the top of Google for one of your most important keywords, a Malaysian pop star decides to use a similar phrase as the title of her newest album and pushes you back down, or a competitor gets hit with a lawsuit that makes you want to scrub the term as quickly as possible.

In other words, it's not easy and the game is always changing.

For that reason, a lot of businesses get a little bit desperate when it comes to SEO. What starts as a mission to improve online business quickly becomes an obsession with RSS feeds, embedded tags, and long-tail key phrases. And really, there's nothing much that's wrong with that... so long as it doesn't interfere with a core marketing strategy.

There should be a reason you're trying to improve your search engine position, and one that goes a bit deeper than "trying to get more hits." Having some sort of established plan can keep you grounded in moving forward, even in the face of inevitable distractions and setbacks.

There's no way around it: good search engine optimization takes time. Looking for shortcuts, or just moving things around to stay busy, isn't just a waste – it’s counterproductive. That's why it's so important that you have a good idea of where your best clients are coming from, and how you can find more of them through Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

This is a small step, but one that's critically important, because without it you'll find yourself constantly chasing the latest fads and trends. There certainly is a time and place for working the details and staying ahead of the curve, but it's only after you've covered the basics.
Search engine optimization is a complicated topic, and that's why so easy to "miss the forest for the trees," so to speak. Have an online marketing plan, stick to it, and then examine your progress from time to time. It might not be as exciting as frantically updating pages, but it's going to be a lot better for your bottom line in the long term.

posted by Mark

- Terry Ranson