Internet Marketing Category

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

Look at Seasonality When Selecting Keywords

What are people searching for? It is whatever is impacting their life at that moment. It could be a plumber to replace the hot water heater, the menu at the local restaurant or how to set-up their new WordPress blog.

Many keyword phrases have a distinct seasonality within the year such as Christmas lights or graduation gifts. Other phrases are seeing growth year after year and others are shrinking in use. Google has a free tool that allows you to research these trends… it is called Google Trends

Google Trends: View popularity of topics over time. Based on Google search data, graphs of search volume are available. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Graphs show the relative popularity of each search term over a specified period of time – (data since 2004).

Picking the right keywords is part art and part science. You need to understand the psychology of how and why people search. People search the web to find information, answers and a solution to a problem. Sometimes it is best to get the help of keyword research services to set the right foundation for your search engine optimization.

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Sunday, September 25th, 2011

7 Powerful Conversion Techniques You Can Put to Use

People arrive to your website with a specific intent. You need to answer their unasked question and then guide them toward a specific action. You want to create a win-win for both you and the visitor.

  1. Message: Make your central message clear. You have only a few seconds to communicate your benefits, how you are better than your competition. Use your page headlines, your graphics and your navigation to communicate your message.
  2. Call to Action: Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Make it clear and highly visible. Place your primary call to action where it can be easily seen without scrolling down. It needs to be highly visible to arriving visitors. Examples of calls to action include- “Buy Now”, “Order Now”, “Join Today”, and “Sign Up For a Free Report”.
  3. Placement: The upper right quadrant of your web page gets the best response. Place your phone number in upper right with email sign-up forms just below.
  4. Build Trust: Show visitors that you are trustworthy. Show prospects there are no risks. Build trust at every step. Show your phone number and address. Post a guarantee. Have a no-risk returns policy. Show your privacy policy. At an action step such as a sign-up for, reassure with an excerpt from your privacy policy.
  5. Compelling Copy: Effective copywriting attracts targeted visitors and begins the selling process by attracting attention and building interest in what you have to offer. Website visitors come looking for answers to their questions or problems. Merely giving information or logically presenting your products is not enough.
  6. Subscriber Sign-up: The best way to convert a visitor into a customer is to convince them over a period of time. Grow your email list via an opt-in or subscriber form on your website. The idea is to keep inviting people back and to encourage the repeat buyer.
  7. Incentives: Provide an incentive to sign-up. Your incentive needs to make an impact. Something that causes them to say “wow” I need more of this. The key is start by delivering something they really want in your initial incentive.

Hint: Start strong and finish strong. Grab their attention when they arrive, and astound them with your finish. Put your best material at the beginning and the end.

Tips are from SEO coaching and conversion expert Doug Williams

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Saturday, September 3rd, 2011

Keyword Research Services: How to Choose the Best Keywords

Selecting the best keywords for your website is part art and part science. Start by thinking like your buyer. You need to understand the psychology of how and why people search. People search the web to find information, answers and a solution to a problem.

  1. 3-5 words: Buyers will typically use phrases with 3-5 words or even longer. Buyer phrases are very specific and will include things like make and model or specific locations or details as searches get refined.
  2. Singular: Buyers tend to use highly specific phrases as well as singular rather than plural forms. A person looking for new furniture is more likely to type in “leather sofa” rather than “leather sofas”
  3. Local: If you are a general dentist in Portland, Oregon, don’t target “Oregon dentist” if you only have an office in Portland. People will only travel a few miles to a dentist from where they work or live.

Buyer phrases are action oriented and very specific. Usually it is best to hire out keyword research services if you are going to optimize your own website.

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Sunday, July 31st, 2011

Who are Your Best Buyers?

How do you tune your website to focus on your best customers? You do this by creating a behavioral profile of your best buyer. Behavior is considered the best way to predict future actions, so understanding what drives their behavior is critical.

Start by asking a few questions about this group.

  1. What problem, goal or need is driving them to search for your product?
  2. What is the main obstacle that might stop them from choosing what you sell?
  3. What one thing is most likely to persuade this group to immediately buy once they learn this about your product?

Think of your best buyer as a character. Define their job position, demographics and education. What are their buying criteria? What is their role in the buying process? How do they reach a decision? How skilled are they? You want to develop your character’s personality around traits that show how your character views the world, speak, thinks, and acts.

By thinking of your best buyer as a character with needs, feelings and motivations, you can craft your website message to appeal to them. By visualizing your best buyer, you are better able to reach them and convert them into buyers.

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Sunday, July 24th, 2011

Nationwide Companies Can Utilize Local Search

How can a nationwide business make use of local search? If there are multiple locations, then local search will probably make sense. They should if their product or service is consumed or searched for locally. Consumers today are placing trust more in local companies. Local search is one of the hottest growth areas in the Internet today.

A national restaurant chain may market nationwide, but people search for a local place to eat. It is more cost effective to optimize for local terms rather than investing in a national search campaign.

Even if a company wants to go after broader, national terms, it is not a bad idea to start out targeting local phrases where results can happen more quickly. Then follow up with a focus on the broader keyword phrases which will take longer depending on the competitiveness of the market.

Apartments for Rent

One company that advertises apartments for rent to a national audience has broken down their business into 60 metropolitan markets. They promote each metro market separately because people looking for apartments search locally.

They are not trying to have the number one organic ranking for “apartments for rent” which is a broad keyword phrase. Instead they are after dominating the local phrases around city names, neighborhoods and zip codes for the markets they compete in.

The same strategy would work well for any national chain where people use the service on a local basis. This could include self-storage units, restaurants and other franchises.

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Saturday, July 9th, 2011

8 Ideas to Re-Use and Recycle Your Blog Postings

Once you write a blog posting, how can you re-use or recycle your writing? You can reformat, combine and rewrite them. This way your marketing can continue and reach new audiences.

  1. Twitter: Use excerpts from your blog with links back to your blog. This will help attract new readers.
  2. Email Auto Responders: Create compelling educational emails for people who sign up for your email list. Following up with 8-10 emails allow you to create an e-course.
  3. Newsletters: Publish a weekly or monthly newsletter using your blog postings. Include these along with special offers to create an interesting newsletter.
  4. Articles: Combine two or three related blogs into an article that you can publish on article syndication sites. Use the articles as reports and offer them to your email list.
  5. eBook: Combine your postings and re-write into an e-book. A 30-60 page e-book makes an excellent giveaway as you are building up your email list.
  6. Book: Become an author. Combine even more postings into a 200 page book and self publish using CreateSpace which allows your book to be sold on Amazon.com.
  7. Videos: Record short videos based on your blogs and include on your blog or post on YouTube. You can even create a YouTube channel. These can be you standing up in front of a camera or doing a voice over using PowerPoint slides.
  8. Webinars: Use material from your blog and create a webinar or seminar. Use PowerPoint to create slides for your presentations. These can be free webinars to attract new customers or charge for them.

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Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

SEO Gives You Much More Than Top Rankings

People naturally trust top rankings sites more. SEO or search engine optimization is the science and art of getting your website discovered, analyzed, indexed and then ranked on the search engines.

People are looking for what you provide. They are searching to buy. They are using the web to find a business to buy from. Every sale that you miss out on is one that your competitors will get, making them stronger.

What benefits should you expect from SEO?

  1. More Credible: People trust the natural search results more than paid advertisements. According to a Penn State study, searchers are 4X more likely to click on the natural search results over the paid listings.
  2. Perceived Leader: If your website comes up with a top ranking, searchers assume that you are a leader in your market. This translates into easier sales and even repeat business.
  3. Targeted Traffic: SEO can increase the number of visitors who are actively searching for your service or product. People search for answers, if your product solves a need, then they are highly interested.
  4. Lower Costs: While you may pay to have your web pages optimized, there are no payments made every time someone clicks on your listing. Paid search can be quite costly, especially for high volume, low intent phrases.
  5. Long Term: Once you obtain top positions through a SEO campaign, it is relatively easy to maintain it with only modest costs. Compare this with PPC (Pay per Click) where you need to continue paying for every click through.
  6. Measurable: Results are easily measurable using analytics. You are able to measure traffic, which keywords brought in visitors and even which ones brought in buyers.

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Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

7 Important Web Strategies for the Startup Business

Focus first on content rather than on the design of your website. Great content is what people are searching for. Think of your website as a great piece of artwork. The frame is the design of your website that holds the real content. It is the content that is the real masterpiece that people are searching for.

How do you arrange the content for maximum effectiveness?

  1. Branding: Your business name and website domain name should match. This makes your business name more memorable. The domain should be a .COM. Over 73% of all domain names in the US are .COM.
  2. Strategy: This is your “who, what why” for your marketing. Decide who are you trying to market to? How do they make their buying decision? What are you marketing and how is that different and better than what your competition offers? Why should they buy from you? Build your website around this strategy.
  3. Website: Put up a website to give your business a credible image. Your website needs to answer the questions your potential customers are searching for. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. Why did they come to your website? They came looking for answers. You should supply these answers.
  4. Local SEO: Apply local SEO to your website so it will come up quickly when someone does a search for you on Google. Usually this means optimizing your website for your “city + a broad keyword phrase”. More on how to optimize your website for local search.
  5. Mobile: Your website needs to render well on cell phones, smartphones and ipads. Test out your site. You may need to display a mobile version of your site when it is being accessed by a mobile device. This is easy to do if you have a knowledgeable web company building your site.
  6. Google Places: These listings are free for any business that has an actual physical location. These are the 7 Google Map listings that appear when doing a search for local businesses. More on how to create a Google Places listing.
  7. Social Media: FaceBook is and will continue to be the #1 social networking website on the web. According to Alexa, it is the #2 most visited website in the World (after Google). The impact of this is that any business engaged in social media marketing, should have a presence on Facebook.

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