AccuQuote, a leader in providing term life insurance quotes, leverages blogs, online videos, podcasts, and tweets to generate leads and revenue.

In the video below, the company’s VP of marketing and business development, Sean Cheyney, offers examples of how the company uses social medial and measures success.

The following are some key takeaways:

• Life Insurance Education – Give something of value to the community, try to avoid posts that contain a “call to action” message
• Recruiting – Use social media to recruit and connect, save money over traditional channels
• Strategic Partnerships – Use social media to drive strategic partnerships, use an integrated approach
• PR – Use Twitter, follow reporters that typically cover the company and industry and allow them to follow you
• Tools – Use tools like TweetDeck and Twitter Search to help manage your social media efforts. Applications like SiteCatalyst from Omniture help track and measure success.

Social Media for the Analytic Marketer, by Sean Cheyney; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal on Vimeo.

Additional interesting information:

• The company has been blogging for 4-5 years
• Company bloggers currently post 5-7 educational articles each week
• The CEO contributes several posts each week
• An estimated 2% of all leads are a result of organic traffic because of their blogging efforts
• Within 1.5 years of the blog’s launch, leads resulted in mid-six figures in revenue

Local businesses have been suffering during this recession, but consumers still want to support their neighborhood shops.

Here are three ways for small retailers to showcase their local roots and boost local economies at the same time.

Read more here…

If you’re using social media to create opportunities online, don’t forget about LinkedIn.

As of this month (October 2009), the site had more than 50 million registered users.

Small Business Trends writer Lisa Barone offers tips on six specific strategies for leveraging LinkedIn to create business opportunities.

Read more…

Several new charts show Facebook’s rapid rise to a top web brand and key player on the web.

Read more here…

According to Facebook, small businesses benefit from over 1.4 million fan pages; averaging 100 fans per page.

Businesses need to go to where their customers are, and today that’s potentially Facebook and other social media sites.

Read more…

I may have gone a little overboard automating my status updates.

I recently set up a twitter account and rather than worrying about updating my status on multiple networking sites, I decided to automate things.

Today, my twitter account can be updated a few different ways.

1. Manually;
2. Via a post on my blog;
3. Adding a website favorite to my stumbleupon.com account;
4. Submitting a new article at eHow.com.

Any of the four types of twitter updates mentioned above will trigger automatic updates for the following sites.

1. Jasonlcolon.com – displayed as a new post on my blog;
2. Windows Live.com – status updates are displayed on my profile page;
3. Plaxo.com – my Plaxo “Pulse Stream” is updated with my latest status;
4. LinkedIn.com – my LinkedIn status is updated;
5. Facebook.com – my Facebook status is updated;
6. MySpace profile – status updates are displayed on my profile page (I setup an account just to test the connection. At least…that ‘s my excuse for having Tom as my only friend.)

In today’s world, having a website for you business is a must. Additionally, it’s no longer good enough to simply build a website and put it online. You must not only make it easy to find, you must actively promote and market it as well. Today I’m going to cover six steps that you can take, starting today, to help drive traffic to your site and help it “get found”.

1. Get local
The popularity and use of local business directories are on the rise. Large search engines, like Google, are linking business listing with their online mapping applications to provide a complete business listing. It’s essential that you register your business and web site with these local directories in order to help visitors find you. Start with Google’s local business directory. You can register your business at http://www.google.com/local/add. You must sign up for a free Google account if you don’t have one already.

2. Get Personal
Business networking has moved online. Create a profile for yourself and/or employees using the popular business networking site – LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com. Additionally, get your co-workers to create profiles as well. As with “old fashioned”, face-to-face networking, it is what you make of it. At a minimum, your LinkedIn profile will be at or near the top of search engine queries for your name and you’ll have a link back to your company’s web site. You’re profile ranking benefits from the vast resources LinkedIn uses to boost their own search engine rankings.

3. Get Linked
Do your business partners, vendors, and affiliates have links back to your web site? Google has a test to check incoming links to your site. Typing “links:yourdomain.com “ (minus quotes) into Google’s search bar will display a list of web sites with links to your site. Whatever the number of incoming links is, try to increase it by asking for links on other web sites. Be sure to reciprocate on your web site. Incoming links are a surefire way to help boost your search engine rankings.

4. Get Active
Set aside an hour each week to contribute content to another web site. It’s essential that your contribution be useful and a no-strings-attached proposition. Find a web site, blog, or message board in your industry and post a comment, tip, recommendation, or solution on the site. Be sure to include a link back to your site if allowed. Become a perceived expert in your industry! Whatever you do, don’t post garbage.

5. Get Fresh
How fresh is the content on your web site? Have you thought about starting a blog? Search engines love blogs. You may also try creating your own monthly “Top 6” list for your industry. As with your contributions in number 4, make certain that the content is useful. Your content should educate your visitors. If possible, add fresh content every week.

6. Get Optimized
Is your website search engine optimized (SEO)? Until now, you’ve should have been able to tackle most of the steps listed above. Optimizing your web site can be a formidable task. Consult a professional if you’re not sure how to proceed. Two key topics to consider are keywords and analytics.

Keywords – Just because you sell airline tickets doesn’t mean that people are searching for them when they’re ready to fly. They may be search for cheap flights or some other variation. The point is, you won’t know until you do the research. Check your keywords at http://inventory.overture.com. This is a great tool to show you popular keyword searches based on keywords that you enter. It’ll make sense once you visit the site.

Google Analytics – At the most basic level, how do you know what is and isn’t working on your site? Not technically, but as it applies to your content. Wouldn’t it be great to know what content is a homerun with your visitors and what content is a dud? Once you know your homerun content, topics for new content are easy.

Look for a SEO tip sheet coming soon. For now, get out there and start promoting your web site! Get yourself found!

There’s an old saying that goes like this: The more I know, the more I know how much I don’t know. Well, two hours worth of practical eMarketing techniques at the Key Entrepreneurs Development Center certainly helped me fill in some of the gaps. And at $29.80 per class ($149 for 5 sessions), the ROI is out of this world.

Brad Kleinman packed the first class full of practical information that could be put to use immediately. The following are a few highlights.

1. Newsletter Marketing – Two online services, Constant Contact and iContact, make electronic newsletter processing a breeze. Both are relatively inexpensive and offer trial periods.
2. Podcasts – Create your own podcasts using a free program called audacity.
3. Google Trends – Perform keyword and competitive benchmarking.
4. Keywords – Your homepage should have 150 words, 3-7% of which should be your 3 primary keywords.
5. Embedded Calendar – Embedding Google Calendar into your website is a cinch.
6. Embedded Video – Embedding Video inAto your website is fairly easy using Brightcove.TV. Apparently, Brightcove.TV is more professional than YouTube.
7. Embedded Slideshow – Embed presentation slideshows using slideshare.net.
8. Book Publishing On-Demand – Publish a book on-demand using LuLu.com.
9. Promotional Material – Create your own promotional materials using CafePress.com. Upload your logo or image and have clothing or other items within days.
10. Google Alerts – Use Google Alerts to track new websites and/or blog posts containing certain keywords. Brad Kleinman uses Google Alerts to track new blog posts containing his name. Hello Brad!