Tools for Online Marketing – Charity Edition

Charities, like any organization can and should engage in online marketing activities, especially, since in most cases it’s much easier for them to attain results with smaller investment.

Take Twitter, for example- a charity can generate a strong following much faster than a commercial company just by virtue of people being more emotional and interested about a good cause than they are about an iPad (in most cases at least).

Who needs pandas anyway? It’s not like they can connect to Wi-Fi..

Every charity should ask themselves ‘Are we gaining the maximum benefit from online presence?’ For many charities the answer would be a definite ‘no’ and that’s a pity, because now, more than ever, there’re more low cost tools and resources at a charity’s  disposal than ever. Here are some of them:

Facebook Moving Into Search… Not

There was an article earlier today on AllFacebookLand, where a user posted about Facebook possibly testing a second search box with a ‘Search the Web’ label. This is not true! Facebook later commented that this may be a third party app or malware.

I’d suggest to run some virus or malware scans, if you see this, just to be safe.

 

The fake search box on Facebook

 

One Step at a Time #2 – Engage and Track

This post is a part of the One Step at a Time series. View previous post here.

In the last installment, I talked about the first steps of a new website. That is registering your brand name on social networks and getting your site indexed on the major search engines, thus probably saving a couple of quid. Today let’s take that further- start “engaging” and “tracking”.

Engagement

One of the main things in any marketing campaign is consistency and it’s no different in the case of social media. Create a persona and stick to it. Do you want to be official, friendly or act like their high school buddy? Do you keep an air of authority, try to generate discussions or just want your followers to laugh at every update? The recommended approach is to go with what seems the right image for you or your organization, just don’t break the character you’ve adopted.

The major buzzwords in the social media marketing circles is ‘engage the audience’ or ‘engage the following’ or even ‘build a following’.

Afterwards just set to 'follow'

State of Google – Latest Trends March 2011

“The world is moving – either move with it or watch it float by.”

/Someone./

The above is also true to search engines and especially for the biggest of them all (cue drum roll) Google. The reason why they moved to the top is that they were changing and adapting faster than other search engines of the time. And they’re still at it, dragging the internet with them on the way to complete their mission: ”..to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Google - helping you access the most useful gossip since 2000

Keyword | Keyword | Title or Basic Onsite SEO

Two of the most frequent questions we get asked by potential and existing clients is a variation of “How does my website look from an SEO perspective?” or “How can my website rank higher on Google/Yahoo/Bing/Yandex/SearchEngine?”

In most cases, especially with local or small businesses and charities the answer is, quite simply, onsite SEO. Not link building, social media, elaborate affiliate campaigns or voodoo rituals, not that those don’t matter, it’s just that it’s the basics that count the most, especially, if you’re just starting online activities.

To put it into perspective- if you’re ranking in top 10 for ‘yellow socks’, you’re already doing stuff right on your site and you need the stuff mentioned above (apart from the voodoo ritual.. probably) to rank higher. But if you’re ranking on page 9361 of search results, then there’s something missing from your own site and no amount of whitehat SEO (more on that later) off site will put you on 1^st page faster than getting your yellowsockextavaganza.com in shape.