Gone are the days when bookmarks are only tucked in on books! In this Internet era, anything is possible in just one click, and that includes social bookmarking.

Before, we can only share an interesting article, email, or photo via email as we deem such medium as the most common. But, social bookmarking sites now come into the surface joining the mainstream of social media.

What is a Social Bookmarking Site?

So, what is social bookmarking site? It is basically a form of social networking that allows a member to bookmark and share something interesting online without having to navigate too much. However, with social bookmarking, only links or snippets of the content are shared, not the entire content of the webpage.

Websites with social bookmarking features include Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg, Scoop it, Tumblr, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Flickr, among others. As far as linking and spreading information online is concerned, these sites can deliver the fastest, which is probably the reason why search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google have slowly been overshadowed in the spotlight.  With social bookmarking sites, you can easily locate niche topics without having to type keywords in multiple search engines (which is time-consuming) and find the information you really want. Hence, the effort is lesser and it’s definitely time-saving!

How does it work?

So, how does social bookmarking site really work? Well, you have to know that social bookmarking sites come in two types. First, once you’ve found a page that interests you, you have to go back to the site and paste the link on the provided space. Second, you may just click a single button through widgets should you come across a good video or article that strikes an appeal to you. This is even more convenient compared to going back to the site where you have to click and copy paste the web link to somewhere you want it shared and published. It spares you from navigating too much, doesn’t it?

Perks of Social Bookmarking

Well, social bookmarking does not only limit the user to share appealing content on a website. He can also follow other users allowing him to be updated with interesting content being bookmarked every now and then. Good thing is, the comment boxes can be an avenue for forum discussions and exchange of comments among the users.

It goes without saying that social bookmarking broadens your online linkages as it enables you to share valuable information on a large scale in just one click. What is more, it also increases traffic to your site and improves your website search engine rank, and then generating income follows.

Customer loyalty is very important for any business to grow.  Customer loyalty is a process to build a strong and long-term relationship between customers and a brand. It helps a business retain existing customers, get them to buy often, and serve as an ambassador to acquire new customers.

Here are some factors to help your business build customer loyalty:

Quality Products

What is more convincing than selling products that are high quality and reasonable for their price? Quality is always what customers consider above anything else when purchasing items, and if they are not satisfied with a product that you offer, they will seek from other competitors. The quality of a product can speak for itself to the customers to buy it. It also speaks about your company on how reliable it is. Quality is important for sustaining high customer satisfaction and loyalty. They will keep coming back to buying your products because they have already experienced and proven their quality.

Website

If you run a business and don’t have a website, you are missing out on huge opportunities for your business. A website can be used to achieve many different marketing strategies to help your business grow. Your website can sell products to customers at any time, any day. Potential customers are not constrained to business hours because a website can be browsed and accessed 24/7. They’ll just go online and purchase products whenever they want.

However, having a website itself is not enough. You have to build a website that is user-friendly and responsive. A user-friendly website can make them stay on your website for a long time and keep on browsing products that they may actually like and buy it. A website that is easy to access has good visuals and relevant content is a great way to help maintain loyal customers. Always remember to build a website that is responsive for all devices and platforms such as mobile phones, desktops, and tablets.

Social Media Presence

With the many users of social networks nowadays especially Facebook which is known to be the most used social network with 1.71 billion monthly active users, having a social media presence is absolutely a must for any business. When used correctly, social media can be a huge asset for your business. You can connect with all the people all over the world that matters most for your business, with the ability to spread your company’s message.

Using social media platforms allows for everyday communication with customers and can be a great way to deliver a higher level of customer service which in turn gains the trust of your customers. Keeping your social media active all the time and interacting efficiently with the customers is actually an essential factor in having more loyal customers.

Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is crucial for customer satisfaction and retention, as well as profitability in the eCommerce industry.

Each product or service sold online is supposed to be backed up by customer service as a part of its quality guarantee.  A research report by American Express shows that 58% of customers are willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer service. Therefore, it is important to maintain the philosophy that every customer matters. Being extremely customer-focused offers huge success to your business.

Ask for feedback

Feedback, both positive and negative, is a good thing for a business to make its best even better. Soliciting feedback from customers is a great factor in keeping them around because it is an effective way of listening to make them feel that their opinion matters to you. In that way, you build trustworthy relationships with them and they will feel that the company is always ready for improvement.

Reward Loyal Customers

Loyal customers love rewards! A little incentive for the loyal customers can do more in the long run. Treating them kindly and with care will make them feel they are appreciated and vital to the sustenance of the company. Provide them with rewards such as discounts, coupons, giveaways, etc. and never forget to thank them!

Launching a rebranding campaign for your company is a challenging proposition, especially if you think about the potential risk for your SEO rankings. With so many online marketing channels available today, the process of rebranding your company has become much more complex.  On top of the difficult process, repositioning, creative headaches and everything else that’s involved, there’s just one problem: Google.

What is Rebranding?

Rebranding is the creation of a new look and feel for an established product or company. The usual goal of rebranding is to influence a customer’s perception about a product or service or the company overall by revitalizing the brand and making it seem more modern and relevant to the customer’s needs.

After all, the purpose of a rebrand is to improve your image in one or more ways, with the goal of becoming more relevant, more competitive, and/or more profitable in your target market. Rebranding can be done well with some careful planning, know-how, and a solid team on your side. Your business will thank you in the end when your SEO ranking doesn’t drop extremely instantly upon introducing your new brand. Done incorrectly, rebranding can cost you not only the SEO ranking but also the customers you’re hoping to reach.

To make the rebranding process as smooth as possible for your business, consider the tips below:

1. Try to Keep Your Original Domain Name

Changing your corporate image at any level is a long and tricky process with many potential things that can go terribly wrong. However, keeping your original domain name is the best way to keep the process simple and has the least chance of damaging your SEO rankings. We understand that too often a company name is exactly what needs to be changed during rebrand to give your business a makeover and a fresh start.  Given that your business or products have new names or that you’ve moved your content to a new website, just make sure you understand that if you do decide to change your name, you’ll definitely need to change your domain name and you’ll take the risk of losing a lot of search engine traffic.

If you feel like you must make the change, transition will demand a lot of work with URL redirecting unless you want to have all your previous SEO efforts ruined. The best way to make search engines realize there’s a linking between the old and the new brand is creating a new page in the new domain that will be dedicated to the old brand. This page should offer an explanation on the changes you made and provide some details about what’s new about your company. This page should serve as a kind of a bridge between the old and the new brand.

Once you’ve done doing this, make sure this page links to your new homepage. This won’t get you the SEO results you had before, at least not immediately, but it will surely make a significant and positive impact.

2. Try To Preserve Your Existing Content

Changing the name of your business usually won’t involve just a change in the domain name, but it will probably result in a complete redesign of your website.  Even if you have to completely have a website redesign, try to keep your original content whenever possible. If you feel like you have to create new content for your website, try to closely reproduce your old content in order to avoid losing your authorship and authority. This will help you prevent your rankings from dropping. Anytime things change, people notice – and so do search engines.

Don’t overlook simple things like your fonts and headers; maintaining these little details could make a big difference when it comes to SEO.

3. Try To Maintain Your Old Site for a Short Time

Optimizing your website takes a lot of time and energy, so it’s important that you don’t let all of your efforts go to waste when it comes time to rebranding. Some experts suggest NOT to take down your old site as soon as the new one has launched. It can take servers several days to recognize the new IP address. This means if you delete your old site right after your new site is launched, you could potentially ruin all your SEO hard works.

If you can, keep the old site live on a temporary web address.  It’s not hurting anyone to leave it up for about 5-7 days, so play it safe and don’t hit the “delete” button too quickly. Just make sure the site can’t be accessed by a crawler.

4. Use Redirects Correctly

In the end, it’s all about 301 redirecting your pages and then tracking your SEO in Webmaster Tools from your old site to your new site. This is the most important aspect of SEO when comes to rebranding or website redesign. A 301 redirection is the way to send both users and to a different URL from the one they originally requested.  It is a key to maintaining a website’s domain authority and search rankings when the site’s URL is changed for any reason.

So, you should redirect every page from your old site to the corresponding page of your new site to optimize the user’s experience and boost your search engine results. Be aware that when moving a page from one URL to another, the search engines will take some time to discover the 301, recognize it, and credit the new page with the rankings and trust of its predecessor.

5. Try to Retain the Same URL Structure

Customers like familiarity, so when redesigning a website, you ought to keep the URL structure intact. Before you get started on a new design, use a crawler to map out your existing website thoroughly to get a complete list of existing pages. Then you need to map all the old URLs to the new ones and let 301 redirects transfer the users and the authority you’ve built to the new website. This way, all your pages will maintain the rankings they had. Once you’re finished with the redesigned website, crawl the new site to compare its structure to the original site.

6. Promote Your New Brand

Time to get the word out. After rebranding is done, it is important to promote your new brand by updating all your social media sites and directory listings. Depending on the social media platform and directories, this can be simple or challenging. You can also end up with more traffic and overall visibility than you had before by doing these things:

1. Email announcement. Send an email to your customers, vendors, suppliers and friends letting them know that they’re going to see some new things.
2. Press release. Draft up a press release and get it in front of key media outlets in your industry.
3. Guest posts. Write a blog post (or two) to sites whose audiences can learn from your rebranding experience.

7. Monitor Your Changes

Finally, it is important to monitor the changes you have made to track traffic and rankings closely to spot any irregularities quickly. You should monitor your website for at least two to three months.

Bottom Line

So, there you have it. Rebranding is not easy but when you follow these SEO best practices, a rebrand shouldn’t mean losing all your organic search rankings and traffic efforts, but an opportunity to start. Just remember to be careful and methodical during this process.

There is no doubt that the invention of the Internet has revolutionized the way man lives. It brought in its wake a connectedness that the world was lacking, coupled with speed and accessibility. Coincidentally, it was these three things that businesses in various industries have always been looking for.

First it would be prudent to assume that businesses exist, or enter the market, in pursuit of profits. Hence when each makes a rational decision, it is always in consideration of profits, whether in the short-run or long-run. Second, that since these businesses pursue profits, it would follow that it is their primary interest to maximize profits. It is from here that we draw our analysis of the Internet’s impact on businesses sales.

Recall that each sale happens when a producer and a consumer agree on a price at which a good is sold and bought (that is, a double coincidence of wants), and thus is affected by demand and supply. Demand-side factors, such as age, sex, season, and income, are given. No matter how advanced the Internet gets, it won’t influence decisions based on those factors. Rather, it would be more interesting to look at preferences and advertising.

Preferences and tastes play a significant role in the determination of demand, and have always been the trickiest to account for in sales. Since each individual has a unique nuance in wants, it is the main challenge of a seller to find out, then somehow aggregate each preference so that it comes up with a product that appeals to the largest segment of its market, but not so much as to alienate the individual. The power of the Internet here is the ability to not only reveal, but in special cases, induce preferences.

The sheer number of hours people spend online usually results in particular trends and fads emerging from time to time, from viral pictures, posts, and videos. Purely from the fact that such materials became so popular, it is then revealed to the firm what the people actually want. From there it can modify, or even create products that cater to such preferences.

Another aspect of demand is advertising, which, through the internet, has increased its penetration more than ever.Companies now consider online advertising as a necessity to remain competitive. Further, advertisement via the Internet gives one the illusion of exclusivity, in that one thinks the message was delivered especially for the user. Given the volume of exposure to such materials, a consumer’s preference over time may tend to favor those it is most familiar with.

Supply-side factors tell the other half of the story. Given that firms maximize profits, this means that they simultaneously maximize revenue and minimize costs. Needless to say, the Internet has drastically lowered various business costs through the years. Administrative costs of keeping files and records (paper, cabinets, storage areas) were switched for virtual memory at a much lower price.

Correspondence between businesses, which used to entail transportation and opportunity costs for lost time, has been made easy through electronic communication. Important meetings could be held online without the hassles of travel. Suppliers from different countries are not hindered by vast geographical distances anymore. Doing business has been made easier and easier.

Moving out of the business’ perspective, perhaps the most important effect that the Internet has had on sales is inclusive – it isn’t just the businesses who could sell anymore. It has created a market of its own which gives rise and facilitates transactions between the non-corporate people. Online buy-and-sell web sites, such as Amazon and eBay, reported revenues of $2.1 billion and $2.11 in 2015 respectively. These not only reflect the degree of penetration of the Internet as a means of doing business, but also indicate its users’ confidence.

To sum everything up, we answer one question. In a world without the Internet, what would happen to sales? It will retrograde: decrease, and decrease in volume, become more exclusive, yet perhaps a little more supervised.

Photo: Pixabay