Freelance web and seo copywriting from Mud Creative » Social media

I’m still standing – just in a different place.

louise — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:16:54 +0000

If you’re checking my blog and wondering where the heck I’ve been, I just want to say “Thank you for dropping by!” I didn’t fall off the face of the blogosphere, I’m just trying a new avenue.

After years of working as an independent copywriter and SEO writer, I have formed a new company with a partner – my long-time colleague and SEO mentor, Pat Assad.

Our company is called Azura Marketing. Our tagline, “We work the web for you,” encapsulates exactly what we do for our clients. Keeping pace with the ever-quickening pulse of online marketing, we can help you realize the rich opportunities of the new frontier.

The right mix of Internet marketing strategies can:

Give your website stand-out power with SEO and PPC
Help you connect with your Internet audience on a personal level with SEO copywriting
Create a site that is a hub of interactive activity with SEO-friendly website design and programming
Ensure that you’re mixing and mingling at all the web hot spots for your industry with social media
Position you as the go-to expert in your field
Turn your site into a sales-building machine
Improve conversion rates
Create meaningful, long-term relationships with your clients and prospects through email marketing

Let’s face it. Between PPC, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, autoresponders, and more, the web has become an intricate digital labyrinth. Just talking about this stuff can send most people into a tailspin – let alone actually doing it.

That’s where we come in. Between our two heads, we have more than two decades of experience working in web environments. And many of our clients have watched their websites (and profits) soar to new heights with our help.

If you want to set your site higher, please visit us at Azura Marketing.

Again – many thanks for checking in on Mud Creative. I hope that we can continue our professional relationship on the other side.

11 tips for communicating with the virtual team

Free Social Media Listening Tools

louise — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:03:56 +0000

Wouldn’t you just love to know what people are saying about your business on the Internet? Whether positive or negative (or dead silence, which is not great either), understanding how your company is perceived by others is an important part of knowing how to shape your product or service to satisfy them.

Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts provided this valuable list of free tools in her January newsletter so you can be your own personal fly on the wall. She has kindly offered to let me post it on my blog.

Take it away Mhairi….

One of the best ways to explore whether social media is right for your company is to listen. Social media listening means using these tools to listen for mentions of your product or service, company, competitors and industry. By doing so you will get a great feel for what is being said about your product or industry, how people communicate, what is appropriate – and you might even learn a thing or two.

Here are some great tools you can use:

1. General:

Google – www.google.com
Google Alerts – www.google.com/alerts – this service sends e-mails outlining Google search result for your key-phrases.
Backtype – www.backtype.com/ – search terms, follow conversations.
Social Mention – www.socialmention.com – real time social media search and analysis.
Pipl – www.pipl.com – great tool for assessing your personal brand online across multiple social networks.
Trendrr – www.trendrr.com – social and digital media tracking.

2. Twitter:

Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/
Monitter – http://www.monitter.com/
Tweetlater – http://www.tweetlater.com/

3. Facebook: www.facebook.com

Facebook search – for people.
Facebook search – for keywords.
Facebook wall comments – Lexicon.

To subscribe to the Out-Smarts newsletter, visit www.out-smarts.com.

How To Gain Followers and Influence Tweeple – by Glenn Hilton

louise — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:13:11 +0000

I found this rich information-packed post on the Outsmarts Marketing blog. Definitely worth a read. I am still extracting nuggets from it to improve my own Twitter presence.

Dear Twitter . . . What I like about you.

Did it work? Tips on measuring the success of your online press release.

louise — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:02:51 +0000

Last week, I tuned into another valuable webinar hosted by PRWeb with Greg Jarboe, President and CEO of SEO-PR.

As we all know the Internet has changed the face of the press release. But what’s more, the web has changed the way we measure the effectiveness of it.

Back in the day, PR pros would use “clip books,” which contained clippings from publications that picked up the story, to prove success. But how many people read it and acted on it? Those numbers were simply not available. As Greg says, you can’t take the “clip book” to the bank.

The web gives us the tools to prove the true worth of a release.

• PRWeb reports – If you use PRWeb to distribute your release, you will have access to a host of reports including Headline Impressions and Full Reads. You’ll be able to see how many people actually read your release, clicked on a link or printed it out. (PRWeb will be introducing some new reports in the new future including reports of sites where your release appeared and actions taken from the release such as downloading a pdf or forwarding the release.)

• Connect the dots – If you have more than one property or brand, Greg recommends using your analytics to compare the number of queries (searches) of the promoted site or product against the unpromoted property.

• Were there conversions? – Embed a unique tracking link in your release and point it to a unique action-oriented landing page asking the visitor to fill out a form, download a pdf or buy a product.

• How do you measure the value of a “tweet?” –A Twitter search for your keywords will show you if your release is a topic of conversation as well as offer clues as to who may have blogged or will be blogging about your story. Greg says “Tweets are early morning radar to blogs that may show up later in the day.”

Greg points out that there is still value in the traditional press release, but with fewer and fewer journalists out there, it is harder to get coverage through these channels. “When you get it, it is precious and rare.”

You can view the PRWeb webinar with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR here.

Tools to improve your social media listening skills

louise — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:09:41 +0000

With so many avenues of communication available online now, how in the cyberworld do you keep tabs on what is being said about your company, products and services, competitors and your industry in general? In her latest blog post, Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts Marketing offers some suggestions for free and paid tools that will help you stay “in the know” online. Check out “Are you listening?”