Understanding and Using AIDA (including 22 things you can do to improve your site performance)

The name Aida (made famous in Verdi’s opera) means “visitor” in Arabic and “reward” in Swahili. This post is about the marketing acronym, related to visitors and rewards, outlining consumer attitudes: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. I’ll present the concept, orient it in relation to your site visitors and give you some ideas on how to use this conceptual model for your own marketing.
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Business Strategy and Twitter

Like any tool, there are greater and lesser reasons to use Twitter in a business setting. The articles on this page are focused on delivering strategic thought about Twitter for business use.

• Everyone loves a bullet list so here’s your list of 50, courtesy Chris Brogan.
• Integrating Twitter into a business culture courtesy of Jerry Owyang.
• Another one from Owyang about strategic use of Twitter so it doesn’t overrun your life.
• If your strategy is enhanced by being perceived as a guru, this post quickly walks you through the listen-network-be-a-guru process.
• Laura Fitton has a great reading list about using Twitter for business.
• Elliot Ng of UpTake discusses the process his company went through in determining their business use of Twitter. Includes thoughts on corporate Twitter handle vs personal Twitter handles aka Personal Brands.
• A discussion of the difference between having a lot of followers vs having less but more loyal followers, using High School as an anti-metaphor.
• If you’re using a variety of social media channels already, you may be interested to know what Twitter disrupts. Laura Fitton’s research should help you out.

If you’re ready to begin, check out the Getting Started with Twitter for Business page. If you’re looking for something more detailed or specific, perhaps you’ll find it on the main Twitter for Business page.

Feel free to use the comments to let me know about other business strategy and Twitter articles.

Long Tail, Business Blogs and Measurement

There has recently been some chatter about long-tail-focused blogging, especially in that little corner of the blogosphere occupied by your local-loving real estate bloggers. And since I can’t help but wade into something that could possibly be measured I bring you this post.

If you want a sparkling essay on why long tail strategies may be better than mass media/generalist approaches, Theresa Boardman has it for you at Inman News.

If you want a brief example of the longtail improving a business, read how the long tail is affecting Jonathan Dalton’s business.

What is the Long Tail anyway?

The Long Tail as a marketing theory was established by Wired editor Chris Anderson back in 2004 and or Clay Shirky in 2003. Wikipedia tells us that the Long Tail is used:

“to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”

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Paid Search vs Organic Search for Realtors

If you’re a Realtor who has been hesitant to dive into Google AdWords, today is the day to get started.

First, you’ll want to be clear about the difference between “organic search” and “paid search.” Organic search results are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm (a fancy word for method), rather than paid advertisements. Search engine algorithms are a bit of a mystery and always changing – and Google and Yahoo like to keep it that way. Until you’ve spent some time (and perhaps money) to optimize your site content and understand the variety of elements that contribute to the algorithm, ranking high on a Google search engine results page (SERP) with “organic” search can be frustrating and challenging.

Another way to get traffic to your site is by setting up a “paid search” campaign with a tool such as Google AdWords to generate more traffic to your site. If you’ve done a good job delivering those people to the right part of your site for their search terms (known as a landing page), those new visitors will hopefully “convert” by contacting you and/or registering on your site to make best use of the search tools the next time they return. You can also use what you learn from your advertising successes to help inform decisions on your site content, but that’s a topic for a different post.

You can get started with online advertising on your own or get in touch with the Internet Marketing Team at Union Street Media. You can also keep following this blog for more information about internet marketing for Realtors. In particular, follow G. Dewald’s series on Website Optimization for Real Estate.

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