Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Internet Marketing Service
Internet Business SEO On A Budget
Feb 28th
When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) no one needs to tell any Internet business owner how important it is to do it right because they all know the reasons why they need to do it, however being able to afford it is quite a different thing. Small businesses typically have much smaller budgets, little or no staff or resources and are under strain regularly to cover all bases with the little time and finances they have. This makes spending money on SEO and where to spend it a challenge for any Internet business trying to get noticed.
Small Internet businesses have the advantage of being able to trial different methodologies and experiment with their SEO, they move faster than big companies to get things done but in the end cost is the biggest deciding factor in the choice of SEO they decide to implement. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) does not need to be costly however and can be achieve cheaper in order to get you the ranks you would like. Hopefully the tips below will help.
- Find a company good Internet marketing service that specialises in dealing with smaller businesses that will work with small budgets of around £200 – £500 per month, who is reputable.
- Ensure you find a company who will do you a custom deal where you can pick and choose what you want and what you pay for (one size fits all is not the company to go for), by doing this you are maximising your budget and getting results that suit your business needs not theirs.
- Learn to do it elements of it yourself; there are lots of free keywords tools like those on offer by Google. For link tools try SoloSEO, Majestic SEO or SEO for Firefox, for rank checking why not try SEO toolbar and last but not least you could try content writing yourself or your social media.
- Don’t be a last minute dotcommer and wait till your Internet business website and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is failing before finding help, it will be more costly to fix if you do this.
- If you cannot afford an internet marketing service provider buy books, not those from gurus online but real ones which give solid basic SEO advice and guidance, however do not take this option if you have no time or the will to read or learn SEO otherwise you are just wasting time and making your internet business website SEO worse.
The most important thing you can do as an internet business owner is take action, decide what you can comfortable afford, find a good internet marketing service to provide the service within your budget and get your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) underway or do it yourself either way you need to get your website out there and in front of prospects so you do not miss out on the opportunity of gaining new customers.
A Three-Phased Approach To Optimised Press Releases
Feb 23rd
Internet marketing is all about getting your internet business, and, by extension, your brand in front of as many people as possible and eventually, with enough exposure, into consumers’ subconscious.
One of the best ways of getting exposure for your brand is through the use of press releases, provided they are properly optimised and distributed through appropriate channels.
Optimisation of a press release consists of three distinct phases, which we’ll discuss here.
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
In order for your press release to be found through the search engines, it needs to be optimised for your business’s keywords. And placing keywords strategically in specific sections of your press release is what will produce the best results, so let’s look at the areas we need to target:
a) Title Optimisation
The title of your press release carries the most weight as far as the search engines are concerned, so placing your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible will help your release rank and be found.
But, your title should be written not only for search engines but also for human visitors, so it needs to be not only keyword-focused but also attractive and enticing enough to get searchers to click on it in the search engine results.
b) Summary Optimisation
The second most important area to optimise is your summary, where you can introduce one or two additional, secondary keywords. This is where you should expand on your release title, while incorporating your additional keyword phrases.
You should look on your title and summary as the press release equivalent of title and meta description tags, following the same rules for SEO.
c) Keyword Anchor Text Linking
When a press release is published, some distribution sites will push your release as a full page addition to other sites which provide valuable backlinks to your site. The anchor text linking back from such sites to yours should be optimised to use the relevant keywords.
2. Click Through Optimisation
The main objective of an optimised press release is to drive traffic to your web site. Here we’ll look at strategies you can use to position your business for substantial traffic from your release.
a) Use Multimedia
The addition of photos, videos, etc., will help draw readers further into your content, so incorporate as many such multimedia elements as possible.
b) Call To Action
A press release is a vehicle to get traffic to your web site, so you need to make it clear to readers what you want them to do and why. Some compelling reasons you can offer them for clicking through are a free report, more details on your product or service, or a subscription to your newsletter for more tips and information.
3. Must Pass Editorial Standards
Sites that publish press releases are news sites, so your release needs to follow the guidelines for a correctly formatted release.
Human editors check releases for editorial correctness, so follow these 3 points:
a) A Clearly Stated Company News Item
A press release is designed to deliver a news announcement from your company, such as a new product, upcoming company event, etc.
b) Must Be Written In Third Person
Other than a direct quote, a release should be written in the third person and should not refer to the reader as “you” or the company as “I” or “we”.
c) Claims Must Be Attributable
Any claim made in a press release must be directly attributable to a particular party and not as a generic claim.
A properly optimised press release is a great internet marketing tool that can rank in the search engines and work wonders for your internet business and your brand.
A UK internet marketing service can supply the expertise to help you with your press release campaign and maximise your internet marketing efforts.
Facebook Moves Ahead Of Yahoo! To Become Third Largest Site
Jan 28th
In case you’re still not convinced of the importance of social media platforms, and Facebook in particular, as far as the marketing of your internet business is concerned, recent figures released by comScore may finally do the trick.
Facebook’s Continued Unprecedented Growth
The latest traffic figures released by comScore show that Facebook has overtaken Yahoo! and moved into third place on the list of most visited sites on the internet with an estimated 648 million unique users visiting the site worldwide, according to comScore’s November 2010 report, pushing it past Yahoo!’s estimated November total of 630 million visitors.
Google still remains top of the heap as of November 2010, having had about 970 million unique visitors, with Microsoft in second place with 890 million, and Facebook now occupying the third slot.
Facebook had been catching up to Yahoo! pretty rapidly all through the year, so it’s no big surprise, given the social media giant’s
incredible growth, that it finally took over the third spot from Yahoo!. The two sites had been in a virtual tie for third place according to comScore’s October 2010 report, with about 633 million visitors each worldwide.
Facebook now probably has its sights set, whether intentionally or otherwise, on software colossus Microsoft, and, given Facebook’s meteoric rise over the last year or so, who would bet against that happening before too long?
Charting Facebook’s Meteoric Rise
Back in July 2009 Facebook was in fifth place, just behind the Wikimedia Foundation sites (these include the sites Wikipedia, WikiAnswers, etc.), which it passed up the following month, holding on to that fourth position for about a year and a half until this latest jump.
Other notable scalps left in the wake of its global meteoric rise include MySpace (surpassed in April 2008), Amazon (passed up in August 2008), eBay (falling victim in January 2009), AOL (beaten out in February 2009), and now Yahoo!. That is some pretty impressive conquests already, and there’s no sign of the momentum slowing yet.
Other achievements of note are that Facebook is now the U.S.’s second largest video site, second only to Google (which owns YouTube, of course), and has the fourth largest number of display ads currently in the U.S.
It should be borne in mind that Facebook’s numbers differ slightly from comScore’s, clocking in at a scant 550 million visitors worldwide.
However you slice it, Facebook has a massive presence on the internet and continues to grow leaps and bounds, and if your internet business isn’t yet part of the ever-increasing wave, you’ll be missing out on what could be the business opportunity of a lifetime.
An internet marketing service can help you take advantage of Facebook’s growing influence and position your business for future growth and success. Take advantage of their expertise today.
A Winning Formula For Collecting Customer Intelligence
Jan 17th
The recent downturn in the economy has wreaked havoc in every sector of life, including Internet businesses, which, even if not as badly effected as other sectors of the economy, still haven’t been spared the rod.
This means that consumers have less to spend and are being much more careful about where they spend it, which, in turn, means that business owners need to be much more aware of the internet marketing needs and preferences of the consumer in order to be able to connect with them in a meaningful and productive way.
Web Sites Need To Become A Customer Intelligence Tool
In order to connect with customers, it’s now necessary for internet businesses to gather as much internet marketing information as possible about them, their attitudes, their preferences, interests, etc., in order to be able to target their offerings to them and turn them from potential to actual customers.
This can be achieved by turning your web site into a customer intelligence-gathering tool by applying the following phases:
- Keeping your web site and its content fresh to encourage return visits
– Personalising your site so that visitors feel that it’s all about them and what you can offer them
– Tracking how visitors interact with your site and what works and doesn’t work, how visitors reached your site, which content they browsed, where they exited etc.
Utilising this approach will give you the insights you need to make your visitors’ online experience meaningful and develop customer loyalty.
Four Steps To Gathering Customer Intelligence
Here’s a four-step approach you can utilise to gather the customer information you need to help make the internet marketing of your site as attractive and appealing as possible.
1. Feel Their Pain
People visit a web site to fulfil a need or to fix a problem, so being able to identify that “pain point” and offer a solution will keep your visitors happy and coming back for more.
2. Make Sure Your Site’s Ready To Engage Visitors
Visitors to your site are probably already very knowledgeable about the products and services you’re offering, so you need to stay several steps ahead of them and set yourself up as an authority figure. If a visitor looks at the price of an item on your site, that’s a good sign they’re thinking of buying and your site should be ready to allow them to do just that.
3. Check Visitors’ Readiness To Buy
By assigning a score or weight to each piece of content on your web site, you can determine what your visitors care about and even what stage they’re at in the purchasing process. Which pages your visitors browse and which images they click on helps build a profile of your customer and their intent – or otherwise – to buy.
4. Gather Data And Track What Works
The way visitors interact with your web site can give you some invaluable data about their attitudes and behaviours that should be compiled in your database. This data, combined with offline customer data and interactions, can be used to measure successful outcomes, which can then be repeated to improve the customer experience.
Accumulating and utilising data about your web site visitors’ behaviours and attitudes throughout their interactions with your company can help you refine and improve your marketing efforts for both your Internet business and your offline endeavours, and thus improve the overall customer experience and your relationships with your customers.
An Internet marketing service can provide the expertise you need to turn your web site into a customer intelligence tool and take your Internet business success to the next level.
Bring Your Web Site Photos To Life
Dec 22nd
It’s hard enough getting visitors to your internet business web site in the first place, but actually engaging them and keeping them there and getting them to interact with the content on your site is another matter altogether. Adding videos to your site certainly helps, but that takes time and planning and you may not be in a position to create videos right now.
If you have photos on your site (and how many sites don’t have at least a few photos on them?), they may engage your visitors but aren’t particularly interactive. However, that can change now, thanks to Phlook (pronounced “flook”), a web site that takes any photo you care to upload and converts it to an interactive version of the same photo.
What’s It All About?
It’s about giving your visitors more opportunities to interact with your site by making the photos on your site interactive, thus allowing your visitors to interact with them, thereby engaging them more and potentially leading them to take the action you desire. It’s a proven fact that when visitors enjoy being at a web site and spend time there, they feel more relaxed and so are more inclined to buy a product or service, supply their e-mail address, recommend the site to friends, etc.
Phlook now provides you with another avenue for you to extend your visitors’ time on your internet business web site and make more of them feel comfortable with your site so you can eventually get the outcome you desire.
How Does It Work?
The service couldn’t be any easier to use. First, you register for the site (it’s free) and then you’re ready to start converting your photos. Just follow these simple steps:
- Upload a photo
- Enter a description, select a category and enter tags
- Save the changes
- Copy the code to embed the photo into your site
Once the photo is on your site, your visitors can then interact with it by hovering their mouse over it, at which time several options become available, including adding a note to the photo, voting for the photo as a favourite, zooming in and out and e-mailing the photo to friends.
To Interact, Or Not To Interact?
While this may not be suitable for all internet business web sites (even though the more you can interact with your visitors, the more successful your conversions are likely to be, but that would be a business decision for your company), there’s little denying the benefits it could bring in the form of potential conversions, or at least return visits (how many people aren’t curious to see whether or not their comments spurred any further discussion?). This gives people the chance to be heard, and it could also help generate feedback for your web site design and its content while helping to develop a sense of community for your site and your brand.
Engaging and interacting with web site visitors is becoming more important as the social side of the internet looms larger in people’s daily lives, so taking advantage of tools like this can only be beneficial to your web site and your overall internet marketing strategy.
