Interesting article on Marketing Vox on how Proctor & Gamble is using social networking to gain some insight into the buying processes of primarily women. They are creating online forums around some of the issues that women are passionate about like breast cancer and careers and then monitoring communications on these issues to pick up information on likes or dislikes. Sounds a little big brotherish to me, but it is proving to be highly effective in determining future markets or areas of demand for P&G’s products. One of the sites is Capessa, and was put together with Yahoo. Sounds like big corporate America has a new smart way of figuring out what people want based on their opinions on hot topics.

Sound like an expensive marketing tactic available only to the big dogs? Not at all. Any retailer in America can do this with a blog…..and some direction from a good blog marketing company.

With the ever increasing popularity of podcasting and online video, it is only natural that firms use this medium to enhance their internet branding. RSS presents an opportunity to disseminate information quickly and easily throughout the internet. Video Optimization is the manipulation of video sharing sites such as UTube and Google videos to ensure that a company’s marketing messages are properly and efficiently delivered to as wide an audience as possible.

Proper distribution of video not only leads to invaluable viral marketing opportunities, but also assists the retailers’ main site with the addition of hundreds if not thousands of natural links. As with everything else internet, there are a tremendous amount of factors involved in this process. It is very important that the blog marketing company you use knows this new market and can achieve results in a timely and cost effective manner.

A lot of blog marketing companies are guilty of focusing solely on generating traffic into your website. While traffic is the lifeblood of any website, the problem that a lot of etailers run into is what to do with that visitor once you have them in your site. Gaudy traffic stats are all well and good, but it is sales that pay the bills. How do you ensure that the visitors you have are converting at as high a rate as possible into revenue for your company? I will put out a series of articles directed at making your landing pages more attractive to buyers. Thanks in advance to Site Pro News for providing the basis for this information.

If your visitor is coming from a search engine or a paid search listing, you need to have the keyword in bold and clearly visible on the page. If I am looking for a specific product or item, the keyword shows me that this page is relevant to my search. Make sure you pay attention to the Golden Triangle on the page. This is the area on the page that starts top left, goes over to the top right and the continues back to the left side of the page. This triangle is always positioned above the fold on the page, ie people don’t have to scroll down. Then make sure you put your value proposition; sale, new product etc, in the middle of the triangle.

It also goes without saying that in order to have a high conversion rate, the page itself needs to be ranked for the keyword or product it focuses on. The best way to do that is with a highly targeted blog linking campaign.

According to a recent study from Hitwise, social networking sites are driving an increasing amount of traffic to shopping and classified sites. Google, in its association with MySpace is set to capitalize on this new trend. The search engine will no doubt be able to increase its lead over Yahoo and MSN and be able to increase its advertising prices accordingly.

But what about marketers who are trying to tap into this incredible increase in social media? How can they cost effectively use all of the new tools available, such as RSS, subscriptions and podcasting? With a blog, and an innovative blog marketing company.

The benefits of self publishing through a corporate blog are very clear. Progressive marketers are already using RSS, podcasting and social media to build their brands.  This gives them a powerful competitive advantage which will lead to increased market share. Soon a corporate blog will be as essential a business tool as a corporate website.