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New Tools for Lead Generation and Sales

By Kristin Gabriel

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Published: 08Jan2009
Word count: 419
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According to the Kelly Group, the percentage of small and midsized home and trade-services businesses with websites will increase to 60 percent by 2010, up from just 33 percent today.

What are the latest techniques and tools for marketing and advertising? Today, we use new technologies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make a website show up on the first pages of the engines like Google when people search for what they want. Then there's Social Media Marketing (SMM). But in reality marketing, advertising and SEO is all about one thing -- lead generation.

There are basically two ways SEO works: onsite website optimization and offsite via links directed to your website.

And the other trend, social media, shows that there are a number of consumer referral and home-services community sites like Craig's List or ServiceMagic. In addition, small business entrepreneurs are posting pages on MyFace, while creative talent post on pages in MySpace. Plus Twitter is gaining in popularity.

Customers are more sophisticated and demanding these days, and we all like to go online and chat about things. So in order to find you and your company, peroduct or service a combination of SEO and SMM targets people who are sharing ideas and opinions, and looking for what you might be selling.

Something like the old fashioned "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," social media is the online way that we share ideas, opinions insights, experiences and perspectives with other people. There are online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, while social media includes an assorted array of online communications hubs driven by users: Internet forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and videos. And there's also picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, music-sharing and instant messaging. These are all new outlets for marketing.

SMM includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. We can add links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit. Marketers can write unique content embedded with key words and phrases, so when people search online, there's a better chance of finding your content via the search engines like Google.

SMM is about being social so this offsite work includes research, and a social media strategy with specific tactics for having two way conversations with target audiences. It is very important to create pages that provide links back to your website, so the search engines see lots of activity. This ultimately will build traffic, and bring you return on investment (ROI.)

Kristin Gabriel is writer and social media marketing professional with a Los Angeles SEO firm. Her company also handles marketing, public relations, and online advertising. Visit MarComNewMedia.com or call 323.650.2838.

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