(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 Feb 2010.)

Almost as soon as email was invented, it was used as a marketing instrument. The first unsolicited marketing email was sent back in 1978, and since then spam has continued to grow exponentially. It’s estimated that today 90% of all email is spam.

Fortunately the average user doesn’t see the vast majority of spam messages. Spam filters are incredibly smart pieces of software, using advanced algorithms to filter out nearly all spam messages. The more you use a spam filter, the smarter it gets as it learns what is spam and what are genuine emails.

Yet sending millions of emails at once is so cheap and easily done that a spammer only needs a few of his messages to get through the filters, and even fewer users to actually buy something from that spam message, to make a profit already.

And that’s the core that lies at the heart of unsolicited spam, as well as legit email marketing – it’s cheap and it works.

While a spammer is happy with a 0.01% response rate on his spam emails, a well-crafted opt-in email campaign can deliver much higher returns for an organisation.

Smart email marketers have learned to go beyond just sending standard commercial messages. The key is what is called ‘permission marketing’ – getting the user’s permission to send him emails, and delivering what the user expects.

A key approach to permission-based email marketing is newsletters. In a newsletter a company can package its commercial message around interesting and newsworthy content. By combining well-written, engaging content with a subtle commercial message, newsletters can form the solid backbone of a company’s email marketing strategy.

This approach has worked well for decades, and is one of the reasons why email marketing is still around after all this time.

Another reason is that email as a communication system has proven remarkably robust. Many new ways of communicating instantly and across vast distances have emerged – instant messaging, text messaging, twitter – but the preferred method of communicating online is still email.

For some reason email resonates with us. It manages to strike a nearly perfect balance between speed and length. Whether it’s a one-word message or an email with several megabytes worth of attachments, emails travel around the world nearly instantly and arrive with almost flawless precision.

Because of this our email inbox is the focal point of our online existence. Email and the World Wide Web are essentially different aspects of the Internet, but we’ve become so accustomed to email that often we fail to realise this. Instead we perceive email as an entirely separate thing.

As long as our daily online journeys start with firing up our email programmes, email marketing will continue to thrive. Unfortunately, so will spam.

The unlikely persistence of Email Marketing is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Social media is the current Big Thing, or so we’re told. You have to Tweet! Be on Facebook! Get Linked In!

But do you really? Is it necessary to be on every social media site and shout your message as loud as you can in to as many microphones as you can find?

Social media websites are not ends in and of themselves – they are a means to an end. For most users social media sites are channels to connect with friends, relatives and colleagues, to read relevant news and keep up to date with stuff that interests them.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the digital equivalent of conversations with friends and acquaintances. This means that commercial messages aren’t really welcome. It’s important to realise that on social media websites the user controls the content – what they read, what they share, what they ignore.

Commercial messages are considered interruptive and unwelcome. That’s why as a company, when you do decide to build your presence on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website, you need to adapt your voice to the medium.

People who are interested in Ford cars don’t want to read loads of hyped sales tweets straight out of car dealer brochures. What they might be interested in is advance information about upcoming Ford cars, inside knowledge of Ford’s R&D, or just to see a human face behind that monolithic corporate image.

The people at Ford know this, so their Twitter account isn’t just a faceless PR machine. It’s run by actual people who have conversations with their followers and provide tweets that are interesting.

This has proven to be a successful approach for them – the Ford Twitter account has over 25 thousand followers.

On Facebook the overall tone is even more informal and social. Where Twitter is becoming a networking tool, people ‘hang out’ on Facebook with friends and family. That’s why success on Facebook depends mostly on how you approach your audience.

While some companies have the benefit of a corporate image that lends itself well to Facebook (Nike for example whose various FB pages boast tens of thousands of fans), for other companies it can be quite challenging to build a strong presence.

They key is to deliver what your fans want. Nike uses Facebook to share cool videos, ask for user input, and launch contests where participants can win great swag.

If all you’re pushing on Facebook is the same sales material as you send by email, you’re not on the right track. Get personal, be authentic, and ask for feedback. Listen to your fans and give them what they ask for.

When you do decide to start tweeting or build a Facebook page, make sure you define for yourself what you want to get out of it. Your goal can be anything from fuzzy marketing stuff like brand-building to solid ROI metrics such as more visitors to your website that convert in to customers.

Sometimes you’ll find that a certain popular social media site just doesn’t work for you. And that’s OK. Social media sites, for all the hype surrounding them, are just channels that you can use for the benefit of your company’s bottom line. If you can’t get any value out of them, don’t use them.

For every social media site that you think can add value, ask yourself the following questions: Is my target audience present? And do they want to hear what I have to say?

As long as you set your expectations and manage your social media presence accordingly, you’ll be OK. Just don’t be social for social’s sake. Whatever you do with social media, make sure it means something.

UPDATE 16 Feb: I came across an excellent case study from Microsoft Advertising on how they successfully deployed social media. It’s a great read and definitely worth your while:
» Microsoft Social Media White Paper – Learn & Earn [PDF]

Use Social Media sites effectively, or not at all is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

About nine months ago I was facing a sizeable site migration project at my employer at the time, and I was tasked with mapping out the best way of handling this migration to minimise the impact on our search engine rankings.

I wrote a post summarising my research into the SEO aspects of a site migration, and I feel the time has come to look back at the migration and the lessons we learned from it.

The site migration was a two-step process – we updated the design and we added new sections with fresh content. We decided to follow the recommendations outlined in my site migration blog post pretty much to the letter:

Content: We phased in the new content one batch of pages at a time. We put a couple of new pages live, linked to them from the homepage, and waited for them to be indexed & cached. Then we put the next batch of new pages online.

Design: The design changes were implemented gradually as well. The old and new designs weren’t radically different, it was more a tweaked & modernised version of the old design, so we felt it would be fine to have the old and new designs co-exist on the site for a while.

We first did a Google Website Optimiser A/B test to make sure the new design yielded at the very least a similar conversion rate. When this was confirmed, we migrated pages to the new design one at a time. The URLs all remained the same so we didn’t have to do any 301-redirects.

We used the Duplicate Content tool to ensure the HTML code and content of our key pages with high SERP rankings matched at least 90% in the old and new designs, so we wouldn’t get hit with a ranking penalty when we put the new version up.

When a page was updated with the new design, we waited for it to be indexed & cached in Google and checked how its SERP rankings were affected.

The end result was a site with a fresh design and new sections added, with minimal impact on SERP rankings. We did see some fluctuations in rankings but these fell well within the normal daily and weekly ranking variations.

We also noted that the new content started ranking fairly soon for relevant keywords, despite no direct links coming in to those pages. This is most likely due to the incoming link value generated across the rest of the site, spilling over to the new content.

It was a long and labour-intensive process, and in hindsight I’m not sure it would have impacted the rankings massively if we just switched the site over in one go. But as organic search generates a significant portion of the sites traffic and revenue, it was definitely better to be safe.

Site Migration SEO Concerns – The Results is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 Feb 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.)

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is defined as ‘the process of improving ranking in search engine results’.

When search engines first appeared on the scene in the 1990′s to help people make sense of the exponential growth of websites, it suddenly became important to show up first in these search engine results pages.

Savvy entrepreneurs quickly figured out how search engines worked and what a website needed to rank first, and the dark art of SEO was born.

The first search engines were relatively simplistic pieces of software that crawled the world wide web and matched words found on websites to search queries entered by its users. All a search engine optimiser needed to do to get his site to the number one spot was stuff as many keywords on a website as possible.

Whether or not that site was actually useful and relevant for the user’s query didn’t matter, at least not for the optimisers. It’s at this stage the SEO industry earned its dubious reputation, a blemish it has yet to discard.

This of course led to abundant complaints from search engine users who were looking for one thing but ended up on websites that offered something entirely different. In response search engines got smarter, but search engine optimisers got smarter as well, and the arms race has been on ever since.

The big breakthrough came with Google who in 1997 added a whole new approach to determining what websites were really relevant for a given search query. Keywords on a page were still important, but more important than keywords were the links from other websites pointing to that page.

Google’s idea was that every link to a website counts as a vote, a recommendation from one website owner to another. The more links point to a website, the more important that website is. That, in a nutshell, is Google’s secret recipe, and while it’s gone through many iterations over the years the core premise remains intact.

Search engine optimisers were quick to catch on. The focus shifted from optimising sites for keywords to optimising them for links. The goal is to get as many other websites as possible to link to your website.

Unscrupulous optimisers, the same types that didn’t hesitate to stuff as many ‘Britney Spears Nude’ keywords on a website that sold vacuum cleaners just to get extra traffic, devised all kinds of different schemes to quickly and cheaply generate as many links as possible.

Search engines like Google also kept updating their software to filter out these false links, trying to count only those links it considered to be real recommendations.

But the web is so unimaginably vast that search engines have no choice but to rely on automatic processes to filter these false links. Machines, no matter how clever we try to make them, are easily fooled, and the ‘black-hat’ search engine optimisers (contrary to ‘white-hat’ optimisers that use only legitimate methods) are smart and inventive.

But perhaps the era of unscrupulous optimisers is nearing its end. The past few years have been very exciting for website owners and search engine optimisers. Search engines have enhanced their results pages with all types of extra content such as YouTube videos and local businesses. Recently new tweets about the topic a user is searching for started showing up in Google results as well.

The latest refinement Google is deploying, called Social Search, integrates content from the user’s online social circle. If, for example, you are searching on Google for a holiday home in Portugal, and one of your Twitter friends blogged about it, Google will show that blog in your results.

This new level of personalisation of search engine results, combined with other changes Google has made and continues to refine, means that search engine optimisers are increasingly unable to rely on the basic optimisation factors of keywords and links.

There are signs that indicate Internet users are being drawn more and more to online community website such as Facebook and Twitter and begin their search for online products and services there as well. Why trust an anonymous search engine result if you can get a recommendation from a real friend? Or at least a real friend of a real friend.

Black-hat optimisers will continue to try and outsmart search engines and force their websites to the top of the list. Setting up fake social media accounts is already a common practice, as any Twitter and Facebook user can attest to, but generally these are easy to spot and filter.

I wouldn’t go as far as to proclaim the death of SEO – this has been done many times before and been proven wrong each time – but as web search moves towards social media, and social media becomes more about web search, it’s definitely going to change the search engine optimisation landscape.

The Changing Face of SEO is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

The steady rise of spam (which is now said to make up over 90% of all emails) has resulted in less emphasis on email as an instrument of online marketing. But well-managed email marketing campaigns are still, and will continue to be, an important instrument in your online marketing toolbox with a great ROI.

Email allows you to engage with your website visitors in two-way conversations, enabling you to connect with your customers. Email marketing is a great way to enhance customer retention as well as cross-sell and up-sell your products and services.

But you can’t just start harvesting email addresses and spam them at your whim. You need to develop a solid email marketing strategy based on your customers’ needs and requirements.

In this article I will outline the basics of email marketing to help you get started.

1. BUILD YOUR LIST

The most important aspect of your email marketing is the list of email addresses your messages are sent to. A good way to build your list is to have a sign-up form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe to your emails. You can also harvest emails from your online order process and contact forms, as long as you give users a clear way to opt-out – or better still, opt them out by default and make opt-in optional.

There are varying levels of legislation for each country regarding opting your users in on your email lists, so be sure to do some research and find out what the requirements are where you’re based. It’s usually best to err on the safe side, as not only will this ensure your emails won’t be marked as spam, your users will appreciate it and you’ll have a greater level of engagement with your subscribers.

2. WRITE YOUR MESSAGE

A good email starts with a great subject line. Users are bombarded with dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day, and the first thing they see when your emails arrive is the subject line. This is the most important aspect of your email that determines whether or not a user will open the email and read it.

Tips for good subject lines:

• Clarify the benefit: users have crowded inboxes so your email’s subject line needs to communicate a clear benefit. What will a subscriber get out of it if he opens and reads your email?
• Personalise: use the recipient’s name in the subject line, as this helps your email stand out and helps make a connection with the recipient.
• Ask a provocative question: Questions make recipients wonder and often encourage them to open your email. An example would be “Are you at risk of overpaying on your insurance?”.
• Avoid spam words: words like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, ‘instant’, and dozens more are often interpreted as signs of spam.
• Be mindful of character limitations: many email clients cut the subject line off at some point, either due to the user’s screen resolution or the program’s layout. Understand what part of the subject is seen by most of your recipients.
• Test, test, test: try out different subject lines with different formats and benefits, and never stop experimenting.

Next is the actual content of the email. Needless to say this needs to match the subject line. If you make a promise in the subject that you don’t keep in the content, chances are most readers will either delete your message straight away, unsubscribe from your list, or report your email as spam. Too many spam reports and your email will never reach another inbox ever again, instead being redirected to your recipients’ junk mail folders and thus oblivion.

It’s generally a good idea to write email content following the same guidelines as for website content: strong headlines, structured content, and clear calls-to-action.

This means starting with a strong headline that describes the content accurately and challenges users to read it. Then you need to divide your content into short paragraphs that are easy to read – large blocks of text are unattractive and discourage readers. It’s also a good idea to emphasize key phrases in your text with bold and italics so that readers that quickly scan through it still catch the general idea.

And finally you need to finish with a clear call-to-action. What do you want readers to do with what you’ve just told them? If you want them to visit your website and buy a product, tell them! If you want them to forward your email to their contacts, encourage them! Use buttons in combination with text links and get users to interact with your email.

3. FORMAT YOUR EMAIL

A good subject line and strong content aren’t enough to get the most out of your emails. Your message needs to look good too. A plain text email will look boring no matter how good the content is. Nearly all email programs support HTML emails, which means you can write email messages the same way as you build web pages.

However, there is one big difference: there are huge limitations on the HTML code you can use in emails. Every email program, from Outlook to Hotmail, from Gmail to Thunderbird, handles HTML differently. On top of that many advanced features used in webpages, such as CSS and JavaScript, won’t work at all in most email programs.

This means you need to keep the HTML code as simple and straightforward as you can. A good rule of thumb is to avoid using any CSS and scripting languages, and stick to plain simple HTML code using tables to build your email’s layout.

If you don’t have sufficient knowledge of HTML, there are literally thousands of email templates available for download online which you can use and adapt for your own emails. Of course you can also avoid the whole HTML hassle and just use plain text emails, as long as you understand that your emails will look unexciting and may not be as effective.

4. USE EMAIL MARKETING SOFTWARE

So you’ve built a list of subscribers, written a good email and formatted it in an attractive layout, and you’re ready to send it out. You can use your own email address for this and manually send it – this is adequate for small lists. (Just make sure to use BCC so your readers don’t see the whole mailing list!)

But if you want to get serious with email marketing, the best approach is to use professional email marketing software. Good email marketing software does most of the hard work for you: managing your subscriber lists, building good HTML emails, and reporting on the success of your email campaigns.

There are hundreds of options available, usually in the form of online services, and for all different business sizes. So you don’t need to have a big budget to make use of good email marketing software.

A good place to start is AWeber, a very popular online email marketing service provider that offers cheap rates for lists under 500 subscribers and has over a hundred ready-made HTML templates to choose from. (Disclosure: I am an AWeber affiliate and get paid a small commission for every sign-up through this website.)

5. MEASURE AND IMPROVE

Once you’ve sent out your first email campaign it’s important to analyse how it performed. Did you achieve what you hoped for? If not, why? Was the open rate low? You may need to work on better subject lines. Were there few clicks from the email to your website? Maybe you need better content or stronger calls-to-action, or maybe the HTML layout wasn’t right.

With email marketing, as with your website, you’re never done testing and improving. There’s always a way to get more out of your marketing campaigns and increase user engagement. Never get complacent, but strive to continually improve your email marketing.

6. ENGAGE IN CONVERSATIONS

Email started out as a two-way communication medium. Despite the rise of unsolicited bulk email, that core essence of email hasn’t changed. Don’t just send out your campaigns and turn a deaf ear to what your subscribers say, but engage with them.

A good way to do this is to make sure that the reply-to address of your email campaigns is a valid email address. Yes, you may get a lot of mail delivery errors and out of office replies, but you will find that many users will reply to your email marketing campaign in various ways. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary, it means that they took the time and effort to respond to your message.

Engage with your readers in conversations, whether they’re complaining about your email or complimenting you. Not only can you get valuable feedback on your email marketing, you will also build customer loyalty this way as well as enhance your online reputation.

Another method is to put polls, surveys, and contests in your emails. This increases user interaction with your emails and will allow you to gather valuable information from your customers.

TO SUMMARIZE

Email marketing is a powerful instrument that can bring strong value to your online marketing efforts. A well-run email campaign will ensure your customers keep coming back to your website. A badly run campaign however can have a detrimental effect on your reputation and might hurt your long-term prospects. So put the effort in and you’ll find the rewards will exceed your expectations.

Connect With Your Website Visitors Through Email Marketing is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

After their successful Search Engine Optimization Guide, Google is continuing to provide excellent entry-level guides for website owners. Their latest guide, Make Your Website Work, gives best practices that help turn your website’s visitors into customers.

The guide is viewable online at Google’s Conversion Centre or can be freely downloaded in PDF format.

Google Explains How To Make Your Website Work is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

So you’re thinking of redoing your existing website, or perhaps you don’t have a site yet and want to set one up. One of the first questions that you’ll face is whether to build and maintain your website in-house, or to hire an external agency to do it for you. What approach works best depends on many factors.

Do It Yourself

Building a website yourself by hand is a pretty daunting task. You need a solid grasp of HTML, CSS and possibly JavaScript and other languages. Additionally you need to be familiar with the basic concepts of web design if you want your site to look at least vaguely professional.

If you have the time and appropriate skills, building a website by hand is the cheapest and most flexible option. All you need is a good web host and off you go. Most of us however won’t have the necessary skills to build a functional and decent-looking website.

Do It Yourself, Advantages:

• Cheap
• Total control over your site
• The sky’s the limit

Do It Yourself, Disadvantages:

• Solid HTML and CSS skills are absolutely necessary
• It’ll consume a lot of your time

Web Publishing / Content Management Systems

With the abundance of user-friendly web publishing software available online these days it’s a tempting choice to use one of these and build a website yourself. Systems like WordPress, Squarespace and Wix make it look easy to design and build your own website in a matter of minutes. (Many webhosting companies also offer easy-to-use web content management systems, but these often turn out to be very basic systems that won’t get you very far.)

The uncomfortable truth however is that everyone can build a website with these tools, but building a good website takes a lot of time and effort.

Web publishing systems can help make it easier for you by providing design templates, easy layout options, and intuitive admin functions, but in the end you’ll still have to invest a lot of your time, and potentially money, to get the most out of it.

Every easy-to-use web publishing systems has its limits and constraints, usually necessary to ensure it remains accessible to non-techie users. You’ll also be forced to work with the design elements the tool provides you with, which can mean your site looks similar to other websites out there. A way around this is to have a unique design made for you. This doesn’t have to be an expensive option – unique WordPress designs for example can be had for a few hundred dollars or less.

Web Publishing, Advantages:

• Easy to set up
• Easy to use (mostly)
• Professional design templates are widely available
• With plugins you can add all kinds of functionality to many web publishing systems

Web Publishing, Disadvantages:

• Not all systems are free to use
• A truly unique design will probably cost you money
• Each system has its limitations in terms of flexibility and functionality
• Getting to know your tool and building a good site will take time

Hire an External Web Agency

If your pockets are deep enough and/or your time limited, hiring an external agency to build your website for you is a viable option. But don’t just hire any agency – shop around and compare. Many agencies are barely more than a programmer and a salesman working out of someone’s basement, and they won’t be able to deliver proper long-term service and support.

When looking for a web agency to outsource your website to, keep the following things in mind:

Does the agency have an excellent website? For web agencies their own website should be a prime demonstration of their skills. It needs to be as good as they can make it. If you’re not blown away by their own site, they may not have the necessary capabilities to build a truly great website for you.

Do they use a lot of technical jargon? Abundant use of web-speak may be a means of hiding their lack of expertise. You want an agency that speaks your language and can communicate their ideas to you in a straight-forward manner.

Does their offer match their price? As in all industries with web agencies you often get what you pay for, but sometimes an agency might take advantage of a new client’s lack of online experience. Don’t commit to a website costing tens of thousands of dollars until you’re totally sure they’re the right people for the job.

Do they offer good (and affordable) support? Building a website isn’t the end of the process, you’ll need proper support from the agency to keep the site up-to-date and error-free. Ensure that the support they deliver after the new website is live is part of the contract, and don’t let them charge huge maintenance fees either. If you’re paying more each year in maintenance cost than your website originally cost, you’re being ripped off.

External Agency, Advantages:

• All the hard work is done for you
• A good agency can supplement your own ideas and come up with even better concepts
• Your website will be unique and (hopefully) effective

External Agency, Disadvantages:

• It’s the most expensive option – by far
• You run the risk of being stuck with a mediocre agency and an under-performing website

Building a Website – Do It Yourself or Hire a 3rd Party? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

I recently wrote about social media and if it’s right for you to start using it as a means of generating more business. This week Michael Stelzner has published his Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This free report is an excellent resource for all who are using or considering social media as a marketing instrument.

The report is based on an extensive survey among social media marketing professionals, and you can distill some great insights from it that can help you determine if and how social media marketing can work for your business.

A few key takeaways from the report are:

• Social media marketing does help with generating sales and business.
• The most popular social media sites used by professionals are Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Doing social media marketing takes anywhere from 5 to 20+ hours a week.

The report (PDF) is very much worthwhile. Whether you’re new to social media or a seasoned pro, you’ll pick up quite a bit from reading it.

Free Social Media Marketing Industry Report is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Communication is what the internet is all about. The world wide web is one huge gathering of voices, of people expressing themselves in many different ways. People use the web to talk to one another about anything and everything. And they can also use the web to talk about you.

Contrary to the physical world where you can rarely know if people are talking about you and your business, in the online world there are many ways to find out if others are having conversations about your organization. Everything that is online can be searched, indexed, compiled and found. The trouble is finding out where the conversations are happening. Fortunately there are quite a few tools available to help keep you updated on what others are saying about you.

First and foremost you have Google Alerts. This very straightforward service lets you subscribe via email to any new piece of internet content that matches your alert query. It will send you an email with the latest article, web page, video, and blog post that matches the keywords you submitted.

This sounds like the perfect solution, but it has a catch: you need to define your query well to prevent getting swamped with non-relevant alerts. Set your alert query too generic and you’ll get hundreds, or even thousands, of alerts in your inbox, most of which will be entirely irrelevant to your business.

A good idea is to set your company name as a Google Alert. Unless your business has a very generic name, this will ensure that you’ll only receive alerts when your company is actually mentioned in an online publication. You could also set alerts for your product brand names, the names of high profile employees, and of course your competitors.

Another very useful tool is Google Blog Search. This is a specialized search engine that only searches in blog posts. Blogs are becoming increasingly important and valuable as a form of citizen journalism, and some successful blogs can make or break the reputations of international corporations. It’s important to be aware of when and how a blogger is talking about your business.

Knowing when people are talking about you online is just the first step. Next you’ll want to join the conversation. But be careful when responding to news articles or blog posts – don’t be aggressive. Join the conversation with a civil tone – this is a public conversation after all and you don’t want to come across as a jerk.

Don’t be afraid to contact the blogger or journalist directly via email instead of openly discussing matters in the comments section. Just be sure to always stay friendly and positive, just as you would with a customer on the phone or in person. One unhappy customer in the real world may not harm your business much, but online everything is stored forever and publicly available to anyone – one negative online argument can come back to haunt you years later.

Find Out When Others Are Talking About You Online is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Social media is a catch-all phrase that encompasses all websites that offer interactive functionality and user-generated content. Social media ranges from social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) to video sharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo), social news sites (Digg, Reddit), social bookmarking (Delicious, StumbleUpon) and everything else that claims the tag ‘social’.

Social media is often hyped as a means of generating a lot of buzz for little money. And part of the hype is certainly founded in truth. Every company of respectable size needs to have a profile or group on social networks, and if you do anything with video at all you’ll need to upload it to YouTube at the very least.

But social media is not a replacement for a good website. On the contrary, your presence on social media sites should stimulate visits to your website, not replace them. If your website isn’t as good as it can be, you should invest your time and money into making it better first before you start experimenting with online projects. The core foundation of all your online activities should be your own website.

A social media project isn’t something you should just jump in either. A successful entry into social media requires a solid grasp of what social media is and what it isn’t, and realistic expectations of what you can achieve with it. Generally speaking, social media doesn’t lend itself very well to commercial exploitation, as the very nature of the phenomenon is non-commercial. Don’t expect users to come flocking to your social media presence unless you’re willing to throw some serious incentives at it.

A recent blogpost from B.L. Ochman about social media myths delivers some much-needed realism – read it and consider if you’re willing and able to step into social media just yet. If you’re in doubt, it’s probably better to spend your efforts on improving your website and gaining traffic the old-fashioned way: SEO, SEM and good content.

Are You Ready For Social Media? is a post from: The Great Websites Blog