Posts Tagged ‘content’
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
If you haven’t started an email marketing campaign for your business. . . that’s your first DO!
Why you ask?
The average return on investment for an email campaign is roughly $44.00 for every $1 spent!! That’s 20x better than direct mailers! And a little more than double internet marketing’s $19.00 for every $1 spent.
DON’T . . .
. . . send out a plain text newsletter. Instead, send out a professional looking newsletter branded to your business. Professional newsletters are opened 8x’s more than plain text newsletters.
. . . send a generic email. Instead, personalize the email to the person who will be opening it. Their name in the greeting, your signature at the bottom and content that is relevant to THEM. A great example, if you just bought a new car, you wouldn’t want the car maker to send you a newsletter with discounts on new cars, would you? NO, you’d want them sending you info on service specials or safety stats, maybe even an add on if you are into modifying cars.
. . . miss an oportunity to grow your list. Instead, build your email list every chance you get, on the phone; on your email signature; on your website – EVERY PAGE; through your social media channels; on your newsletter( if the content is good, people WILL FORWARD); in your actual ’brick and mortar’ establishment (if you have customers there)
. . . expect people to sign up for your newsletter for the sake of signing up. Instead, give something of value away for when someone signs up – coupons, free downloadable report, ebook, etc. and if you can show them what they are going to get from your newsletter, show them a sample.
. . . SPAM, it’s easy to buy a list of email addresses and send your newsletter off this way, but the fact is, you won’t get much business this way. Instead grow your list organically, as I mentioned above, there are lots of ways to grow your list. If you are just starting out send it to friends and family, if they like it they will send it on.
. . . SELL, SELL, SELL. I know it sounds backwards, but people want to build trust with you before they buy, if you are always trying to sell them something they are going to get tired and end their subscription. Instead, provide content that it relevant to them, human interest stories, YOUR story, show your expertise, show them your excitement for what you are doing. And as a side note, add A product or service.
. . . make your newsletter 3 pages long. Instead, short snippets of information, people read 25% slower on the internet than on paper. BE KIND.
. . . use a black background and orange font. Instead, use something that won’t kill your reader’s eyes, they’ll thank you for it and you’ll keep your readership growing.
. . . write staunchy and stiff. Instead, write like you are having a conversation with us and through in your humor once in a while, it’s much more interesting!
There are LOTS of companies out there to choose from when starting a campaign, make sure to do your research and find a provider that will help you through it, give you statistics regarding open rates, clickthroughs, and options for background designs. If you need help, we would be happy to help you get started. Contact us today!
Tags: click throughs, content, email marketing, open rates
Posted in General Business | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
by our guest blogger Justin McGill, SEORCHERS
Eight of 10 people go online when looking for products and services, according to the latest studies from Marketing Sherpa. If you haven’t figured it out already, building your web presence should be your primary marketing focus in the months to come.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of putting your website higher in search engine results so that your business is in front of targeted potential customers who are looking for what you offer. SEO will continue to head the list of online marketing strategies in 2010.
Some of the new and interesting aspects include personalization and greater relevance. That means that as you develop your SEO strategy, dedicate some of your resources to developing content that targets niche audiences. If you are a wine company for example, consider having content devoted solely to wine tasting.
Fresh Content
You’ll also want to keep your web content fresh and up-to-date since search engines will begin factoring publication dates, geo-locations and social media content into their relevancy algorithms. This is also why it’s such a great idea to incorporate a blog into your business website. Blogs are an easy way for you to update your website and keep search engines coming back looking for fresh content. It’s no longer sufficient to just maintain your website and social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You should be updating the content as often as possible—keeping it fresh for search engines—as well as be promoting the profiles via blogging and e-mail newsletters, YouTube, and other social media resources. Creating a cross-promoting strategy with all these tools will go a long way.
For instance, videos that appear on your website but nowhere else online will fail to reach a large portion of your target audience. Web users have a tendency to search one centralized site, such as YouTube, for any content on a given topic. If your video doesn’t appear on YouTube, then for that viewer it may as well not exist. The same thing can be said about your website. If a potential customer performs a search query on Google and your website doesn’t show up, then your company might as well not exist to that potential customer.
Learn the SEO Basics
You owe it to yourself and your business to learn the basics of SEO. This allows you to communicate with your SEO provider or employee performing the SEO. It also helps to ensure you are protecting yourself against the numerous SEO related scams that are in the marketplace today.
So what are some things you can do on your own? Keyword research for one! SEO is a delicate marketing platform that’s easy to lose track of … and ultimately fail with. Your campaign must start with the right keyword focus in mind—this is of paramount importance. Most business owners believe they know those keywords they want to rank well for them. For example, if you sell promotional products and someone Googles the keywords “promotional items,” your company will rank high on the results list. However, you should be considering elements outside of your industry knowledge. Ranking well for a keyword that no one searches for will do nothing for you. That’s why it’s crucial to find the right keywords. And you might have to keep playing with them based on your initial results.
How to Develop Keywords
First and foremost, you want to make sure people are going online and searching for your products or services. So, how much search volume is there for your ideal keywords? You can help identify search volumes by utilizing Google’s Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
Though these search volume numbers are not 100 percent accurate, they will point you in the right direction and provide a decent baseline for your campaign.
Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords that are relevant to your business and offer high enough search volumes, you’ll need to delve deeper into your research. Perform a Google search for your list of keywords. You can see how many results there are for each keyword at the top right of the search results page. The lower that number is, the lower your competition will be.
This is a very simplified measuring stick for you to use as a baseline. This step in your SEO campaign is all too important. I would always suggest you have a professional consultation with an SEO expert that has access to much more robust reporting tools.
Once you have your keywords, it’s what you do with them that makes the difference. You need to have content on your website that is targeted to those keywords. Search engines like Google are successful because their results are relevant to the user’s query. Therefore, they are looking to see what your website is about before giving the results. If you’re targeting a keyword such as “Antique dorm furniture,” then you want this keyword phrase to be a topic of your web page’s content.
Link Building
Another important element of your SEO campaign is link building. This is essentially when another website links to yours. Search engines calculate how many websites link to you when they’re giving their results.
Think of each link pointing at your website as a vote. In general, the more “votes” you get, the higher your search engine rankings will be. This is easier said than done, but you can start by requesting links back from friends, family and other business associate websites. Not only might potential customers come across those links, but you’re building up search engine credibility at the same time.
Converting Visitors
We discussed having content relevant to your keywords. While your content needs to relate to the search query, it also should answer two very important questions:
• What do you do?
• Why should I choose you to do it instead of your competition?
This is part of another online marketing consideration called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO. Improving your website’s conversion rate can net you the money you were previously leaving on the table. If you get 100 visitors to your website every day and are converting 1 percent of them, then you have one new customer.
However, if you did nothing else to increase traffic to your website but focus on better conversion, that alone could increase your revenues greatly. In fact, just by improving your conversion rate to 3 percent, you have three times as many customers through your website. That’s without increasing the traffic. Now, imagine a better converting website that’s also attaining more targeted traffic. Nice.
Using your advertising dollars effectively means putting them toward the venues that will produce the most return on your investment. When done correctly, SEO has proven to be a platform in which businesses can generate long-term ROI.
Justin McGill is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS, a local web-marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization with a focus on converting visitors into clients. In the late 1990s, McGill developed a fascination with web design and what became known as SEO. In early 2008, he invested his wealth of technical knowledge in founding a full-service internet marketing company. More: 1-877-736-5673; www.SEORCHERS.com.
Tags: content, Conversion Rate Optimization, Keywords, link building, ROI, SEO
Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
I don’t know about you, but I love stories and I love to use stories and metaphors to illustrate points that I am making. I find that I learn things easier when I have an anology or metaphor to help me relate to my current situation. . .
I think maybe because the internet is a relatively new “space” and also because as we understand things or we deal with the same things day in and day out, we sometimes forget that others do not see things nor understand them the same way and often the little details are overlooked. So I’d like to share a sort of metaphoric story to illustrate something I see often in the design industry.
Imagine for a moment that you are wanting to build a house. Your family has grown and the space you are in is just too contricting. You and your significant other begin talking about building this house and thinking about all the various things you want in your new house and if you are like me, you sit down and start sketching out where you want the kitchen and how the master bedroom will be positioned in just such a way that the picture window will have an awesome view of [insert your perfect view here] behind your property. After you have sufficiently daydreamed about this house, you contact a few architects to find out what it will cost and so forth. After choosing the “right” fit for the job you wouldn’t just say ok make me a house and leave it up to the architect to figure out what features you absolutely can’t live without, right? Maybe some of you would, but most people would want to sit down with the architect and tell them how many bedrooms, 1 story or 2, an island in the kitchen, etc. they want in the house.
It works the same way for building websites. Just as your architect can create the perfect blueprint of your house with your special features, the right specs and building codes, a web designer can build your web site to fit your style using web standards and principles of design.
So when you meet with your web designer, make sure you have a pretty good idea of the features you’d like as well as, the content you want on the site. The more information you provide up front and the clearer you are on the direction you want to go with your web site design and it’s functionality, the easier the process will be and the better the final result.
Tags: content, features, Website, website design
Posted in Web Site Information | 2 Comments »
