All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising.

A young person wakes up, snaps a few selfies, and spends some time editing before posting one to Instagram. A businesswoman shares her thoughts on a recent merger via Twitter and her comments are quickly picked up by several major media outlets. A gamer engages with hundreds of thousands of people by live-streaming a video game.

A lot of people use the terms ‘marketing’ and ‘advertising’ interchangeably. That’s understandable, to some extent. On the surface, marketing and advertising appear much the same.

Quick question: what’s the most valuable commodity in marketing? It’s not money, nor is it knowledge. It’s not customer loyalty or brand awareness.

Affiliate marketing – where one business pays commission to someone else to promote its products – is an excellent way to generate both traffic and revenue for your brand. Not only does it provide your users with new products and services to try, it can help you establish lasting, valuable relationships with other vendors.

For those of you who haven’t already heard, Google in late June acquired mDialog – a video advertising firm that specializes in helping large media companies measure and deliver video content to a wide range of connected devices. The implications of this purchase seem to be quite clear. Google’s looking beyond the PC to other platforms; it’s hoping to expand its large marketing arm to smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles.

That isn’t all Google’s looking to do – there’s a bit more to this purchase. Continue reading →

As Google strives to improve its algorithms and make content more relevant to the user, social networks gain more and more importance in determining how your pages rank online. How often people talk about your brand, how often they share your articles, how often they like your posts; all of these factors play an important role in how well you’re going to do (though true to form, Google’s remained fairly tight-lipped about just how important).

One thing should be clear: if content is king, then social media is most definitely queen. There was a time when I would have argued that not every organization has something to gain from going social. I think, at least in this context, that such a time is long since passed. At this point, it’s not a question of “if” you should fit social media into your SEO strategy – it’s a question of “how.” Continue reading →

Since its introduction in 2011, Google+ has been hailed as a ‘Facebook-killer,’ “the biggest change in communications since the interactive website,” as well as a ghost town and a ‘complete failure.’ Whatever your thoughts on Google+ on a personal level, with 540 million active users monthly, you can’t afford to ignore its ramifications on your SEO.

Google’s Changing Strategy

In years past, Google was committed to bringing you the best search results, regardless of who owned those results. As the company has expanded beyond search, Google has increasingly promoted their own Web properties in search results. Nowhere is that change so obvious as Google+. Much more than simply another social network, Google+ has become an increasingly integral part of Google’s overall strategy, including how search results are ranked. Continue reading →