Search Engine Marketing for Beginners Part 2

January 29, 2009 Leave a Comment

In Case You Missed Search Engine Marketing for Beginners Part 1


 

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a great way to start driving traffic to your website! However it can be an expensive method of driving traffic! PPC ads are displayed on the sidebar of your SERPs and triggered by keywords that you searched for. PPC gets its name because every time someone clicks on the ad you (the advertiser) pays for it! So if you are not optimizing your campaigns and getting good results from them you need to rethink your strategy!  Click Here for A How To Guide for PPC So what can PPC be used for? 

  • Collecting Names for Your Mailing List
  • Giving Something Away to Get Potential Customers
  • Driving Potential Customers to a Certain Product

There are plenty of different strategies that you can use PPC for! You want to have a strategy mapped out before you start spending advertising dollars on PPC or it can get out of hand quickly!  Lets map out a simple strategy for Collecting Names for Your Mailing List.  1st lets set a goal! Do you want to increase your readership by a certain number or %? Lets say you have 500 names on your email list and you want to increase it by 10% to 550 names. 2nd lets set a budget on this campaign of $1000. So you’re willing to spend $1000 to add 50 more names to your email list. So we need each of the 50 new email address to bring in at least $20 worth of revenue to break even on this campaign.  After following the How To Guide to setting up your ads. We need to create a landing page that give the potential new customer an idea of what your company is about! Your landing page needs a very specific Call to Action! A Call to Action is what you want the visitor to do once they are on your landing page. In our case we want them to sign up to our email list! When designing landing pages keep these ideas in the fore front of your design!

  • Make your Call to Action OBVIOUS
  • Keep the page short and to the point!
  • Make the page scan-able because visitors don’t read they scan

Once your landing page is designed its time to unleash the ads to the public and see what happens!  To make it possible to measure the success rate of your ads, you will need to do the following:

  • Set up a new list in your email marketing program so that all of these new contacts will be placed in that list. This way you know they came from your PPC campaign landing pages and not your regular website pages! 
  • Keep track of this list and cross reference it with all new clients/customers. 
  • If your new email contacts are not purchasing your products/services it may be time to retune your Email Marketing

  Keep an Eye Open for SEM Part 3 (Social Media Marketing)  

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Search Engine Marketing for Beginners Part 1

January 27, 2009 Leave a Comment


  Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an online marketing strategy  that is so vast and complex that large businesses have teams dedicated to it! There is no brief explanation of SEM. However I will attempt one. SEM is a strategy that involves using online search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) to market your brand, products, and services! SEM combines strategies involving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), Contextual Advertising, and Paid Inclusion! Essentially Search Engine Marketing is a way to drive traffic to your website! If done correctly that traffic will be full of potential prospects or new customers that want to help you grow your business! Now lets dive into some of the different strategies that are available for SEM!

Search Engine Optimization-

Organic Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are the pages listing out all of the top  results for the search you just performed on your favorite search engine. The reason these results are called ‘organic’ is because they are the more natural, relevant results for your topic as opposed to the advertisements placed on the SERPs. Search Engine Optimization is the strategy of making your website the most relevant and accessible as possible to the search engines. There are tons of little tricks of the trade that have been discovered along the years since search engines came around. However with search engine technology constantly changing you have to be on top of your game to make sure once you have top placement that you keep it. Many companies will offer you search engine optimization and will guarantee top placement on search engines. However Google specifically states here that if a company offers this then you need to do some more research and they could be offering services using black hat techniques.  There are many resources available online that offer tips and hints for successful SEO strategies. My favorite blog for this is SEO Chat they have more  information on their site than you could ever filter through! In SEO’s article 12 More SEO Tips for 2007 the first tip listed talks about Titles and content. This may seem fairly obvious to some but at the same time has never crossed the mind of others! When users perform a search most of the time they are looking for information. If I’m doing a search for SEO tips then I want the SERPs to display article titles with that in the title and description! Then I want the content of the article to give me a list of SEO tips! Sounds easy enough right? Well a lot of website owners disregard this step and just put a blanket title tag that is displayed for every different page on their website because it’s part of the template.  So if you are just jumping into the SEO strategy those are two steps that you need to make sure are essential to your website! Create individual unique titles for each page and give that page full and rich content!  On the coattail of great content you need to make sure and have content that contains key words that are pertanent to your company! If you need help in coming up with keywords for your company there are a tons of keyword tools available to you. Many you have to pay for, however the one I use all the time is free.

This tool is great and since it’s Google’s I trust their technology to provide me with great keywords. Remember while you’re creating content to inject that content with relevant keywords! However keyword stuffing is frowned upon from an SEO perspective! If you work hard at making your content relevant to the title and to your site and sprinkle keywords throughout the content then with time your SEO will begin to improve! With that being said I believe the best tip for SEO is BE PATIENT. SEO is not something that will happen overnight, its a slow developing process. You have to put the work in and at the same time you have to be patient!  Lets recap on SEO 

  • Title each page on your site uniquely and appropriately for the content displayed!
  • Create Killer content! 
  • Find Great Keywords to inject into your Content!
  • BE PATIENT!

Search Engine Marketing for Beginners Part 2 Coming Soon!

 

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Online Marketing for Small Business

January 23, 2009 Leave a Comment


Online Marketing is a hefty task for any one person to take on. However if you are part of a small company more than likely you only have one person dedicated to marketing and that one person may not even handle online marketing. So how do you develop the resources to build up your online marketing? With Patience and lots of Learning! 

I believe online marketing is divided  into 3 sections.

Each section takes a lot of time to master and really nail down all the details. However it doesn’t take a whole lot of work to make them start working in your favor! There are tons of blogs and resources available to you to find out everything you could possibly want to know about each one of these areas of online marketing. Start small and pick an area that you think would be most beneficial to your small business. Begin learning about the marketing concepts and different strategies for that style of online marketing, and begin to apply them to your small business. Try and take an hour a day to apply these new strategies and concepts. 

I’m going to break down these different online marketing styles and give you more information on each so you can decide which would be most beneficial to your business!

Email Marketing-

I have a post titled Email Marketing for Beginners that contains a lot of this info in it. However I will give you some more to think about here and how you could apply it to your small business. 

Email Marketing is the online version of direct mail marketing. We’ve all received catalogs and coupons in the mail and if something happens to reach out and smack us then we’ll call and order it. Email marketing is very similar except that with email we see about 1000x more marketing messages a year! I believe for a small business Email Marketing needs to be the foundation for your online marketing campaigns. Because you are marketing directly to your customers! Hopefully you have been collecting contact information from your customers! Whether that is their physical address, telephone number, etc. You always need to collect contact information. If you do not have any email addresses collected then there are some alternate routes to about getting email names. However I don’t condone most of them. You can either rent or buy lists, however this can be costly and extremely ineffective! This act will usually get your email spammed and possibly blacklisted

Effective Methods to Collect Email Addresses

  • Place a simple form on your website that collects contact information
  • Send a pre paid postage survey out to existing customers requesting they fill in the information
  • Have an Email Sign Up sheet for anyone that comes into your store
  • Always ask for contact information on any leads that call in and ask for information

No matter what, always get some sort of contact information if someone contacts you about your business! Because that person has stood up and raised their hand and said “I like your product! I want to know more!” That is all you can hope for when it comes to online marketing!

Email marketing should be the foundation to any online marketing for a small business. Its the most direct way to communicate with your customers. They already feel a connection with you and you want to keep that connection going. You want to make that connection last a lifetime!

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an online marketing strategy  that is so vast and complex that large businesses have teams dedicated to it! There is no brief explanation of SEM. However I will attempt one. SEM is a strategy that involves using online search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) to market your brand, products, and services! SEM combines strategies involving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), Contextual Advertising, and Paid Inclusion!

I believe the best resource online for Search Engine Marketing is Top Rank’s Online Marketing Blog. This is chock full of great information and all the latest greatest things going on in SEM!

For a small business I believe SEM is on the second level of importance in online marketing. It’s essentially a way to drive more prospects to you, which is important but I still believe it is secondary in importance to Email Marketing. Personally I believe that for a small business you need to handle your true hardcore customers first, before you go out seeking thousands of new ones. If you can’t market correctly to your core customers then how are you going to retain new prospects and convince them that they need your product or service?

Search Engine Optimization

However there are some key strategies that need to be in place with SEM for future expansion of your small business. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always a buzzword going around online. Every company that offers SEO or SEM services will tell you the same thing ‘We can get you to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN search rankings’. Now this could be true in some cases however its not always the case. SEO is a constant battle. You always have to be looking over you shoulder at your competition and making sure that you are one step ahead of them. Now how do you do this if you’re just starting out? Well it’s not going to be easy. SEO is an ever changing technology. Here are a few things you can do to prepare yourself so you are not fighting a completely uphill battle:

  • Compile a list of keywords for your company. What do you specialize in? A good tool for helping on this search Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool
  • Search for your competition and see what keywords they use
  • Insert Title Tags into each web page created
  • Begin researching on SEO and Check out Google’s SEO Beginners Guide

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is another strategy used for  online marketing. PPC are ads that appear on the right hand side of Google and Yahoo Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). PPC ads are also the ads you see on this site in the rounded blue boxes! This form of advertising can be very ineffective and also very costly if not done correctly!  PPC is a great way to drive traffic to your website. However as I said above if you are not using Email Marketing correctly you should not be driving loads of extra traffic to your site. 

If you would like a detailed guide on where to start with Pay Per Click check out these two articles

Pay Per Click marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site. However it is a time consuming task to get the right target audience to the correct landing pages with the perfect copy to make that sale! With time and constant testing PPC can be very rewarding and an efficient way to drive new prospects to your products or services! Make sure you watch your daily budget for this advertising cost though! If you are not paying attention it can get out of hand very quickly! If you really want to make PPC work for your company you need to devote at least an hour a day to it! Because if you’re paying for that traffic you want it to be the most targeted prospects possible!

 

Social Media Marketing

Social Media marketing, another buzzword that gets throw around a lot in the online marketing community. Social media is essentially any websites that have a social quality to them (ie. internet watercoolers!) The largest sites being

  • Facebook
  •  Myspace
  •  Twitter
  • Digg
  • Stumble Upon

 Social Media Marketing (SMM) is still very new to online marketing, no one has quite figured it out yet. Facebook has been offering PPC advertising and they finally seem to be figuring it out. Zac Johnson has a good article about the updates on Facebook advertising here! Myspace often uses Google’s ad sense program to display ads on their site. However SMM isn’t all about advertising. Its an ever growing way to reach out to new customers and find fans of your products, or fans of products similar to yours. If you can find your target audience in the Social Media world then you should be able to draw them into your site and convince them to check out your products! With over 150 million people on Facebook now. There are countless ways to find your target market. Remember SMM is another great tool for driving traffic to your site, but you still need to have great marketing techniques in place to convert Social Media traffic effectively!

 

Online marketing is a big world but you don’t have to be scared of it. Just eat the elephant one bite at a time! Take time to learn about each strategy and option. Then begin to implement the ones that seem most effective. Like I’ve stated previously, start with Email Marketing because it is the most direct! Follow up by adding more prospects to your Email list by using Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing! Try not to feel overwhelmed and enjoy it! The more you enjoy figuring out online marketing the better you will become at it!

 

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Email Marketing for Beginners

January 21, 2009 Leave a Comment



Email marketing- What is it?   

Everyone has seen it. You get thousands of emails every year from some company trying to sell something to you. Somewhere along the line you put in your email address and then all of a sudden you are bombarded with emails from that company. It’s the online equivalent of Direct Mail marketing. Hence they share a lot of the same names ‘junk mail’ etc. You usually just look at it and throw it away.

What would ever make you want to spend the time creating emails that are just going to get dumped into the trash folder in someone’s email account?  I’ll tell you why you should spend the time creating those emails! 

Email marketing is in my opinion the best way to market to your consumer online! Why you ask?

Because if they trust you enough to give you a piece of personal contact information then they want to hear from you! They have stood up and said “Hey over here! I like what you’re offering, tell me more!” It doesn’t get any better than that! 

Using E-mail as a marketing initiative has been pushed to the backburner in the last few years. Everyone is trying to new and exciting ways of marketing to see what works. Well I’ll tell you what works, EMAIL MARKETING!

Lets break it down why it works so well. 

  • It costs very little to get an email address from someone. Especially if they like your website and or product. They are much more willing to give up that information. 
  • It’s direct communication! You know something about the person on the other end of the marketing message. Unlike direct mail where you just send out flyers to everyone in the same zip code. These are precisely targeted messages!
  • You see instant results! With many email marketing programs such as Emma and Constant Contact you can see exactly who is clicking on the offer in your emails. Then you can create reports of how many people purchased the product you offered in the email! It’s instant gratification!

This is the beginner’s post there will be more tips on Email Marketing in the future!

For Help now check out these Links below!

One of the best sites for email marketing tips is Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing Best Practices

Chris’ book Email Marketing by the Numbers has been the most helpful book on email marketing that I have ever read.

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5 Simple Steps to Start Building an Online Presence

January 20, 2009 Leave a Comment


Since this site is dedicated to helping small businesses with their Online Marketing initiatives I’ve decided to write an article on where to get started! Below I’ve given you an ordered list of what steps you need to take to get the ball rolling! This post simply for getting a website up and running. IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A LIVE WEBSITE SKIP THIS POST

First you must ask yourself why do you even want or need a website? Are you wanting to increase potential sales with new customers that come to your website? Grow your direct mailing list, or start an Email mailing list?You must realize why you even want a website before you start building one.

Secondly do you want your site built out using a blog ( WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc) or a Content Management System ( CMS) (Drupal, Joomla). These are somewhat technical terms, a simple definition for both of these is “a already constructed website architecture that you can plug information into that gives you a ready to go website” thats how I describe these technologies to new clients.Each of these options have their individual pros and cons. However in the end they are the simplest ways to get a website up and running in no time. 

Now that we have answered those questions we can continue on to the  Where to Start List!

Get your pens and paper out and lets go!

1. Step 1 -Buy your domain name-

This is always the first step! If you don’t have a  domain name that links to your business then how are customers ever going to remember to come back? Buying a domain name is very simple. Go to GoDaddy do a search on the domain that you want. I don’t suggest buying all the extra names that GoDaddy offers unless they seem to make sense. For this site I bought www.sizmarketing.com and www.sizmmarketing.com because most of the time visitors will forget the second M in the domain name so it made sense to buy both. Once you have found the domain name that you like and have went through the checkout process you are done with Step 1. 

2. Step 2- Get Your Site Hosted -

There are thousands of businesses that will offer you hosting. If you have decided to make your site using blogging software  or a CMS program then you will need a hosting company that offers a technology called MySql!   Since you are just starting out with your our online presence you won’t be driving very much traffic. Therefore you don’t need to buy the Rolls Royce of website hosting. Here are a few of my suggested hosting companies for a start up website:

  1. Powweb
  2. Blue Host
  3. Host Gator

Currently this site is hosted on Powweb. I like Powweb’s user control panel and their Tech Support is fairly quick to respond. Personally I have experience with Blue Host and I liked it. They had a good support team and everything was very smoothly operated from my experience.  I’ve heard wonderful things from Host Gator as well. All of these companies charge for a year contract. It’s usually $50-80 per year to host which is a great deal. I would suggest any of those three for your newly minted site.

3. Step-3- Install your blogging or CMS software

Using these website building programs make life so much easier for a first time site builder! Even for seasoned web developers these programs make their lives easier. My blog is run on the WordPress software and I think that is by far the easiest blog/CMS software to use. Most hosting companies will have an install service to where all you have to do is fill in a couple of forms and they will instantly install your blog/CMS software. However it would be wise on your part to learn how to do it.

4. Step -4 – Start Writing a Ton of Content

Content, Content, Content, if you want to be noticed on the web and if you want visitors coming back to your site ( and we all want that!)  then you have to offer them something of value. With a ton of content you have to be able to organize it into a useable/findable hierarchy. Make sure all the content that you have, has a purpose for your site visitor. I wouldn’t write stories about my dog on this site. Because it would have no value to you, because your are looking for information about internet marketing. Stick with content that applies to your customer and make sure you have a lot of it!

5. Step -5- Start telling people about your site

In this day and age you have to be your own best advertiser. If you operate a brick and mortar business start putting your website address on everything. Everywhere you have a logo you need to have your url. Every email that you send out you should have your URL in your signature. Tell everyone about your site thats the first way to get people to start coming to your site.   Those are 5 simple steps to get your website up and running. After you have accomplished these 5 steps then we can dive into some more extensive projects such as Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising to really start driving traffic to your website!

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Google is Pacing to Reach 75% of Search Audience

January 16, 2009 Leave a Comment


I just read an eye opening article from Web Pro News.  Google is on pace to reach 75% of the Search Engine audience by mid 2009! This is just astounding. 

I’ve heard numerous internet marketing consultants talk about using all of the search engines so no one gets left behind. I don’t know how much I’m going to listen to that advice. Yahoo is slowly decreasing with their search engine traffic and no other searc engine is even close. 

You had to know this was going to happen sooner or later. The word google has been transformed into a verb in the english. “Just Google It” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this phrase. 

So let me ask you, why are you not doing everything you can to get high placement on Google? If 70% of the all internet users use Google to search online then don’t you want to be found by the masses?

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization lets focus on Google first, then Yahoo and we will have covered most of search engine traffic. Face the facts if you’re getting high placement on Google & Yahoo then you’re going to get good placement on all of the other search engines as well.

 

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