Internet Marketing into the New Decade

by John Eberhard

From my perspective as a former full time musician I used to be oriented to music by the name of the decade it came from; the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on. Here we are coming to a close of the first decade of the new millennium and there has not even been a widely accepted name for it yet. I heard a reference to the decade recently as the “oughts.” We’ll see if that one sticks.

Timothy Noah, on Slate.com, stated at the end of 2004: “The most logical candidate is a term often used to describe the first decade of the 20th century: the "aughts." But despite heavy promotion from journalists and others, it's never caught on.”

Five years on, and still no name for the decade. Oh well.

I’ve made it a habit over the last few years to name what I thought would be the most important Internet marketing strategies for the coming year.

Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2008:

a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising
b. Article Directories / Content Hubs
c. Optimized Press Releases
d. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Actions Done to a Web Site
e. Email Marketing
f. Banner Ads
g. Web 2.0

Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2009:

a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising
b. Blogs
c. Online PR
d. Social Media
e. Video and Audio on Sites and Blogs
f. Article Directories / Content Hubs

Interestingly, in an industry that thrives on change, there was not a lot of change from 08 to 09. Certainly banner ads are not a major force anymore. Article directories are less of a force than they were a couple years ago but are still very effective. Blogs and online PR are still very effective. Social media has become a more dominant force in online marketing in 2009.

My Website Marketing Picks for 2010

As we prepare to enter the new decade (which we assume will be called the “Teens”) here is my prediction for the best website marketing strategies for the next year.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. I was concerned a couple of years ago because of the multitude of companies that had begun using PPC and the resultant rise in bids and higher cost per click. I suspected that either the competition would have a self-normalling effect, driving some players out of the market and cost per click prices would fall somewhat, or the high costs would make the medium irrelevant eventually. Happily the former has occurred. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.

b. Social Media: I have a friend who was bugging me to get into social media a couple years ago when I was reluctant, and he loses no opportunity to remind me of it when the topic comes up. Facebook is the #3 site in November according to Compete.com with 128 million unique visitors. YouTube is #4 with 85 million visitors. Twitter is #43 with 22 million visitors. True enough, social media has become a dominant force in website marketing, as long as you know how to use it. This means developing lots of friends/followers/connections, then sprinkling your marketing message into the conversation in a tasteful, non-offensive way. Shouts of “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff” at every opportunity will not work, because people can easily sever their connection to you and will. For my business I find it works to post several things a day saying what I am doing, such as “I am working on designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am ghost writing an article for a client.” It’s not obnoxious (at least I hope not) and it regularly reminds people of who I am and what I do. And I get business from Facebook and Twitter.

c. Single Dissemination Points Out to Multiple Sites: I believe that one of the primary essences of marketing is to have one message and to send it out as broadly as possible, without having to initiate the communication over and over again yourself. For this reason I really like sites that allow you to put out one communication one time, and have it go out to multiple places. I use Ping.fm to type in short communications (140 characters which is the Twitter limit) and I have it configured to post the message to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, and several other sites. So every time I post an update it goes out to 11 sites and to all my friends on those sites. I use Posterous.com for posting longer communications to my blogs, and I have it configured so it goes out to my blogs on Typepad, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and several other blog sites.

d. Keyword Research: I think keyword research is vital to do at the beginning of your website marketing efforts. The reason is because search engines base all their ranking on keywords. You do not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. You rank well or poorly for specific keywords. And it does practically no good to rank well for a keyword that no one searches for. But at the same time, if you think you are going to be able to rank well for general, single word, category keywords like “golf,” “computers,” “furniture,” or “mp3,” I’m afraid that just isn’t going to happen. There is way too much competition for those keywords. So the key is to find keywords that have decent traffic but not a jillion sites competing for them. Then work those golden nugget keywords into your strategy for blogs, online PR, social media, article marketing and so on.

e. Email Marketing: I first got into email marketing when it was a newfangled thing back in 1998-99, and made millions with it for the company I was working for at the time. Unfortunately a few years after that saw “the deluge.” By that I mean the flood of mostly small businesses flooding cyberspace with their sales emails promoting stock picks, male enhancement products, printer toner cartridges, and a host of other products. And most engaged in tactics that were considered unethical then and are against the law now, such as not removing you if you asked, using deceptive subject lines and so on. My observation is this killed the market for rented email lists. But what does still work today and work well, is developing an in-house email list of customers and prospects who inquire about your products and services, and emailing to them regularly. It works great for selling your products. Just comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

f. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs (some have kidded me about how much). I still believe that they are one of the best things you can do. Blog on Macduff.

g. Online PR: Optimized press releases, containing your target keywords that you found when you did keyword research and submitted to online PR sites, are very effective in building quality links to your website. These links also rank very well in the search engines.

h. Article Directories: I think article directories have become the ugly stepchild of Internet marketing in the last year, because no one in the SEO community talks about them (they rarely ever did for reasons unknown) and the number of directories have dropped off. But I do this for my own sites and for several clients and it still works like gangbusters in developing quantity links.

That’s it. Best wishes for 2010 and may you have the most prosperous year yet. Remember, if you market yourself properly, you can overcome all this “economic uncertainty” and together we will.

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What So Important About Keywords?

by John Eberhard

Keywords are an important subject when doing just about any marketing on the Internet. These are words or phrases that people are going to be typing into the various search engines.

You have to know what the best keywords are to use, when you are doing search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, article marketing, or sending out optimized press releases. Each of these activities is more effective when you have the properly targeted keyword phrases to use.

So it’s important not only to know what keywords to use, but you also have to be aware that the kinds of keywords you need to use will be different for different purposes.

The Big Picture

The first thing to know about keywords is that you have to select keywords or keyword phrases that have a lot of people searching for them. This may seem obvious but I have talked to people who had selected keywords and thought those were the keywords to use but no idea what the traffic was for them. There are several good tools to find out keyword traffic, including online services Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and software such as Market Samurai.

The next thing to know is that at the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing hey are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition

One of the facts of life is that there are usually fewer resources than there are people that want those resources. So it is with keywords. There are lots of companies trying to sell products on the Internet.

For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, you want keywords that don’t have too many sites that are competing for them. If the keyword phrase has too many sites competing for it, you just won’t be able to ever rank well on search engines for that keyword. Most single word keywords have tens of thousands or millions of sites competing for them.

The goal, when looking for keywords for SEO or link building, is to find keywords that have decent numbers of people typing them in, but low competition. I use Market Samurai software to find this information, and I look for keyword phrases that have less than 50,000 competing sites for them, and the lower the better.

Different Uses for Keywords

There are essentially two major uses for keywords, one is SEO and link building on one side, and pay per click advertising on the other.

With SEO and link building, you want to find keywords that have as high traffic as possible, and as low competition as possible. Then with SEO you want to put those keywords into the appropriate places on your website, and with link building, you want to use those keywords in your blog posts, press releases and articles. All of these actions are geared towards getting your site to rank well for those keywords and raise them up onto the first page of search results for those keywords. That gets you traffic from search engines.

For pay per click advertising (PPC), you want to select keywords with high traffic. But here you are not really concerned with how much competition there is for a keyword. And with PPC you want to choose both long tail keywords and more general keywords. PPC is a different animal and if you only choose long tail keywords you will probably not get enough traffic to make it worth your while. There is a lot to know about PPC and I’ve covered that in other articles and will continue to write more in the future.

Good luck with your keyword finding efforts.

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He Said “I Can Guarantee the #1 Position on Google…”

by John Eberhard

Someone called me up recently saying that someone had walked into their office and said he could guarantee them the #1 position on Google for two specific keywords related to his business. My contact wanted to know what I thought of this?

There are a bunch of people out there making this kind of offer to businesses, and I happen to think that most of them are being totally dishonest and preying on the lack of knowledge of most business owners in how this website marketing stuff all works. I have run into quite a few of these guys, who have sold their offer to someone who later became my client. Let’s take a look at some facts regarding all this:

1. First of all, there are two sets of search results on a Google page; the organic results, and the paid or sponsored results. The organic results are the regular results for that search on Google, appearing in the left-hand wide column. The paid results are achieved through setting up a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, and these appear in the right-hand narrow column, and usually at the very top, the 1-3 results on the left, highlighted in yellow. Many of these people who make such promises will just put you up with an ad on Google AdWords, bidding high enough to achieve the #1 slot for the keywords they have promised you. There is no trick to this.

1.  Promising someone the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords, even if they achieve this through Google AdWords or other means, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It all depends on how many people are searching for that keyword. Do you think it would mean anything to have the #1 spot on Google for “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” if only one person per month searched for that keyword? I’m using a ridiculous example but the concept applies to any business. Owning a keyword that no one searches for is meaningless, and any money you pay to achieve that is pretty much wasted. I remember one home improvement client who had been sold a certain number of keywords at X amount per keyword, with all of them having various city names included in the keyword. Most of those keywords had zero traffic and he was being charged monthly for each one, paying around $2500 per month.

1. Even if this guy who promised you the #1 spot for the keyword “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” went out and got you that spot using Google AdWords, you probably wouldn’t get any traffic from it. One of the things to consider when setting up a Google AdWords account is getting keywords that have lots of traffic. And the final product of a Google AdWords campaign is supposed to be conversions, i.e. a person who responds to you and becomes either a lead or a sale. The product is NOT having the #1 position on Google. That may sound great and may be a means to an end but it is not the product itself.

1. There is no way that someone can guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for a high traffic keyword in the organic listings. Maybe they can guarantee it for some lousy keyword for which no one is searching, but this is pointless as I said above. The key with search engine optimization is to first do some keyword research and find keywords that a) have decent numbers of people searching them monthly, and b) don’t have a ton of sites competing for those keywords. These are the gold nuggets. Once you find them you embark on a link building campaign to move yourself up in the rankings for those keywords, and this is a several month process.

In summary, I think these guys who guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords are, for the most part, being dishonest and ripping people off.

The real way to do this, is:

1. Start a Google AdWords account and select high traffic keywords, set your geography so the ads appear in the geographical locations you want, and put your ads up. Then bid high enough so your ads appear somewhere in the top 5, and set it up correctly so that you start driving traffic to your site. Remember that conversions are the key. Using AdWords you can achieve high rankings quickly, while you are working on the next part.

1. Do keyword research, select keywords that have decent traffic but low number of competing sites. Then optimize your site and put these keywords up on the site. Then start a link building campaign using these selected keywords and stick with it for at least 6-12 months.

If you do “b” above and stick with it and don’t bail too early, you will achieve a good number of keywords in the top 20, top 10 and some #1 positions. And they will be keywords that will be worth something.

 

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Aero & Marine Tax Professionals Obtains Sales Tax Exemption for Northwood Properties

Northwood Properties of Manhattan Beach, CA Gets Sales Tax Exemption for Airplane Purchase

SACRAMENTO, CA: Aero & Marine Tax Professionals (http://www.aeromarinetaxpros.com) has obtained a sales and use tax exemption from the California Board of Equalization for their client, Northwood Properties, of Manhattan Beach, CA in regards to their purchase of an aircraft for the business.

Aero & Marine Tax Professionals are the pre-eminent experts in helping purchasers of aircraft and vessels to avoid paying sales and use tax in California and Arizona.

Jay Visconti, the President of Northwood Properties said, “It takes a lot of research and evaluation when we are looking for new projects. Northwood’s new property development projects are driven by exacting market and property research. We analyze locations, vacancy and absorption rates, existing rents, local business conditions and market demographics to locate development sites that fit our investment criteria. We build office and industrial properties, as well as reviving, reinventing and repositioning acquisitions, even those considered at the end of their useful life. We reconfigure older office and industrial properties to meet modern and future needs, going so far as to completely reinvent spaces for profitable new uses.”

“We currently have sites in 6 states and are always looking to expand our operations.  It was terribly inefficient for us when we traveled to a small town not served by a commercial airline. We flew on their schedule and then would up driving hundreds of miles.”

“Owning our own aircraft was the solution. That is when we recognized we needed the assistance of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals. We contacted them before the purchase and got them involved right away. They were a pleasure to work with. Their knowledge in California Sales Tax Law is unmatched.  They provided a framework that was easy to follow. I always felt like I knew what I needed to do because they were in constant communication with me.  When I sent in my documents they were reviewed rapidly and I was very confident they knew what they were doing.  The information they provided was always accurate and timely.”

“They saved us over $27,000.00 on the purchase of our 2006 CESSNA T182T and we are planning a 1031 exchange very soon and will absolutely have Aero & Marine on board with us for all future transactions. I would recommend everyone who is contemplating a purchase of an aircraft to call Aero & Marine Tax Professionals when they are in the planning stage before they buy an aircraft.”

Thomas Alston, President of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, stated “Despite the current financial crisis, the opportunities in the personal and business aircraft sector for tax savings is expanding. We have the knowledge, experience and expertise to help purchasers of aircraft in California and Arizona to legally avoid paying aircraft sales tax. But the purchaser has to follow our instructions to the letter and we have to be involved at the beginning of the process.”

Aero & Marine Tax Professionals shows purchasers how to avoid California aircraft tax and to make certain the full value of their next aircraft, vehicle or vessel goes into their pocket--not the Government's. They have successfully filed hundreds of tax returns with the California State Board of Equalization. Mr. Alston has also published many articles on sales and use tax.

 

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Link Building Case Studies

By John Eberhard

Link building is a vital activity to do when engaged in any kind of website marketing. Google says that the number of links coming to your site is the main criteria that determines your search ranking for any given keyword.

When doing link building, it is a good idea, not only to check how many links you have coming to your site on a regular basis, but also to look at what types of links you are getting and how high they are ranking. In other words, there are categories of types of links you can get, and looking at which ones are ranking the highest will tell you which link building activities to work on.

Here are the general categories of links you should be concentrating on:

1. Online PR sites such as www.pr.com
2. Blogs
3. Article directories such as www.goarticles.com
4. Social media sites and directories
5. Miscellaneous sites like keywordspy or YouTube

I do not include “reciprocal links,” where you try to get someone to link to your site and you link to theirs, because Google stopped giving much link value to these types of links nearly two years ago, though some consultants still recommend them.

I’m going to show three sites I have been working on for link building, and show how many links they have in each category on page 1 of Google results, page 2, page 3 and so on.

RealWebMarketing.net – 53,800 links

Note that 42% of my links on the first 5 pages of Google come from online PR sites, 20% come from article directories, and 26% come from social media sites.

This shows me that the online PR actions I’m doing, writing optimized press releases and submitting them to online PR sites, are creating the largest number of high ranking links to my site. Social media is giving me the second highest hit at 26%, followed by article marketing at 20%. These are all actions I do for my own site on a regular basis.

Client #1 – 8,900 links

Client #1 has 54% of his links in the first 5 pages of Google results coming from article directories, which makes sense as we have been doing article marketing for him for over two years. 22% of his links come from online PR sites, and 8% from social media. We have done mostly article marketing and press releases for this client, little social media, so the results make sense.

Client #2 – 4,100 links

Client #2, whom we’ve been working with for about four months, has 24% of his links on the first 5 pages of Google coming from online PR sites, 16% from blogs, 16% from social media, and 14% from article directories. The number of links coming from the various categories is more evenly distributed here, which you would expect as we are doing link building for him in each category.

The First Page of Google Links

If we summarize the results for all three web sites for the first page of links from Google, we see that 30% of the links on the first page came from article directories, 20% came from online PR sites, 20% came from social media sites, and 10% came from blogs. These percentages show that each of these actions is effective in building links.

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Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

by John Eberhard

Facebook and Twitter are the biggest social media sites right now. Both can be used effectively for marketing purposes, but you have to know how.

Facebook Marketing

There are three main ways to market oneself on Facebook, through a personal profile page, through a corporate or “fan” page, and with pay per click advertising.

Facebook’s pay per click program is pretty good, but that’s a topic for another article. As for Facebook’s corporate or fan pages, many, many companies are putting these up right now, and I for one get half a dozen “become a fan of my page” messages per day. So I think this medium is getting a bit saturated and the effectiveness is dropping thereby, unless you are already a celebrity or well known.

That leaves the personal profile page, and I have found this to be a very effective way to market my business and I have gotten business from it. They key is to build up lots of friends. First, find a bunch of your personal friends, and add them. Then formulate a strategy for adding people that you don’t know to your friends list. I have had the policy of adding people who have 20 or more friends in common with me.

On your home page, on the top right is a section called “Requests,” and if you have any requests pending and click on this, you will see a column on the right that says “Suggestions.” This list shows 4 people you could propose to be Facebook friends with, and under each person’s name, it shows how many mutual friends they have with you. This is a handy way of going through and finding people who have a lot of mutual friends. I sometimes get someone emailing me after I’ve sent them a friend request, saying “Do I know you?,” to which I respond “No, but we have a lot of mutual friends.” They almost always then approve it after that.

Twitter Marketing

The first thing with Twitter is that you have to have a lot of followers, otherwise no one will see your communications. You need to build up your followers to 1,000, 2,000 or more. The usual way to get a lot of followers is to follow someone and then they will in most cases follow you back.

Of course this is time consuming. The first thing you should do is to search for some of your friends who you figure might be on Twitter and them follow them. Then you need to come up with a strategy for adding followers that are potential clients or customers for your business.

There are a number of software packages or online services that will automate the following process to one degree or another. Tweet Adder is an excellent tool. I have recently started using TweetSpinner.com, a free tool (with paid upgrade for more features). TweetSpinner allows you to automatically “un-follow” people you have followed but have not followed you in return. You press the “purge” button and it will “un-follow” 20 of these people at a time, and you can do this multiple times in one session.

TweetSpinner will also allow you to automatically follow people who have followed you but you haven’t followed back yet, 20 at a time. You can also select a keyword, and the system will locate people who have used that keyword in their messages, or “tweets” (I’m glad I didn’t come up with that word), and then follow 30 of them at a time. By selecting the right keywords, this can be effective in allowing one to target people who are potential clients, in that they are discussing topics relevant to your business. Then a certain percentage of them will follow you back.

So the method I have found effective is to jockey these two factors back and forth; adding new people that you are following, then a few days later, un-following those that didn’t follow you back. Rinse and repeat.

Communications Out

I use a site called Ping.fm and have my Twitter and Facebook personal profile hooked up to it, so that when I post something on Ping, it automatically goes out to my Facebook and Twitter (and other) accounts. Ping.fm limits you to 140 characters similar to Twitter, so it is an ideal tool to save time for posting to these sites like Twitter that allow you only a short message.

You have to find a strategy for what to post that will work for you. This should not be “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” as this is frowned upon in social media in general and will turn people off. If you are constantly pitching your products or services in your status updates, people will remove you from their friend or follower list.

A strategy I have used that has worked for me is to post messages several times a day, saying what I am working on with my business. For example, if I just designed a new web site or blog, I post a link to it. Or I’ll say that I am working on a new pay per click advertising account for a client, or sending out press releases, or writing a marketing plan. I will occasionally post something saying I’m offering my book on sale or here is a link to a free white paper, but I limit the frequency of that.

This approach is relatively non-offensive to the social media universe and tends to reinforce daily that I am an Internet marketing consultant and I offer these services. So it keeps it in people’s minds that I do that. And this has worked for me and has gotten me business. And I believe it can work for you too.

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Aero & Marine Tax Professionals Obtains Sales Tax Exemption for Rainbow Sandals

Rainbow Sandals of San Clemente, CA Get Sales & Use Tax Exemption for Purchase of Airplane

SACRAMENTO, CA: Aero & Marine Tax Professionals (http://www.aeromarinetaxpros.com) has obtained a sales and use tax exemption from the California Board of Equalization for their client, Rainbow Sandals, of San Clemente, CA in regards to their purchase of an aircraft for the business. Aero & Marine Tax Professionals are the pre-eminent experts in helping purchasers of aircraft and vessels to avoid paying sales and use tax in California and Arizona.

Jay R. Longley, CEO of Rainbow Sandals, stated “The people at Aero & Marine Tax Professionals are really good and walk you through the steps. When I had problems they helped and baby-sat us through it. We saved about $23,000.00 (California state sales tax) by using the services of Aero & Marine. It was a good experience.”

Rainbow Sandals, founded in 1974, markets their sandal products to 5,000 domestic and worldwide retailers, including the countries of Spain, France, New Zealand, Tahiti and Guam. CEO Longley uses his Lancair aircraft to scout new retail locations in California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. In addition to his high performance Lancair, Longley recently purchased another aircraft and has again retained the services of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals to guide him through the labyrinth of the California State Board of Equalization sales tax requirements.

Thomas Alston, President of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, stated “Despite the current financial crisis, the opportunities in the personal and business aircraft sector for tax savings is expanding. We have the knowledge, experience and expertise to help purchasers of aircraft in California and Arizona to legally avoid paying aircraft sales tax. But the purchaser has to follow our instructions to the letter and we have to be involved at the beginning of the process.”

Aero & Marine Tax Professionals shows purchasers how to avoid California aircraft tax and to make certain the full value of their next aircraft, vehicle or vessel goes into their pocket--not the Government's. They have successfully filed hundreds of tax returns with the California State Board of Equalization. Mr. Alston has also published many articles on sales and use tax.

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High Quality Links to Your Web Site

by John Eberhard

Google has stated that its main criteria for how high your site will rank in their search engine, is the number of links to your site from other websites. So that means one important activity for any website owner is link building; building up the number of links coming to your site from other sites.

But not all links are equal. You can look at the Google Page Rank for a given site and decide if it is worth more or less. But I choose to do it a different way that is more geared to results. I look at the links that I have for my web site, for a client web site, or for a competitor’s site, and see which ones are ranking highly on Google. By looking at that, you know what to concentrate your attention on.

Here’s how to do it. Go to Google and type in your URL like this:
“yourwebsiteaddress.com” –site:yourwebsiteaddress.com

That’s your URL in quotes, a space, a dash, the word “site,” a colon, and the URL again. This will give you an accurate count of your links on Google. If your links are below 1,000, it’s time to get going with link building. Ideally your site should have 3,000 – 5,000 links or more.

So you now look at the results for the top five pages of links, and see what types of sites are coming up there. In my link building activities for clients and for my own web site I have found these types of links to be the most valuable, i.e. because they tend to rank near the top of the Google results:

1. A Facebook corporate or fan page: Although the popularity of these is exploding and I question how many Facebook users are going to them because they’re getting deluged with “become a fan” requests, there is no question that FB corporate or fan pages rank very highly on Google. Mine is the #1 result for my site on Google right now.

1. Online PR sites: Press release sites like www.theopenpress.com or www.pr.com rank very well on search engines, making it an important part of your link building strategy to put up optimized press releases on these sites on a regular basis.

1. Social Media Business Directories: Sites like www.hotfrog.com, www.aboutus.org, and other business directories rank highly on search engines. So putting up a listing for your company on these sites is a good idea, and most are free. We submit to over 20 of these sites.

1. Blogs: Blog sites are given greater importance in search engines than regular web sites. So putting up a blog that has links in its sidebars to your main site is a good idea. I’ve recently also been putting up blogs on all the free blogging sites such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com and linking them all up to Posterous.com so I can post my article at Posterous.com and it goes out to all the blogs automatically at one time. And I find that all of these blogs rank well on the search engines.

1. YouTube: Put up a video on YouTube and include your URL in the descriptive paragraph, and that video will rank highly as a link to your site.

1. Article Directories: I submit articles to article directories mainly for raising the quantity of links, which it does quickly if you submit to 100 or more per month. And some of these directories, such as www.goarticles.com or www.articlecity.com, routinely rank very highly on search engines.

Link building is vital. And the above are the link building actions that will show up high in the search engine rankings.

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RealWebMarketing.net Designs New Web Site for Beeler Healthy Gardens

New Web Site Will Highlight Company’s High-Quality Landscape Design Services

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company, has completed designing a new web site for Beeler Healthy Gardens (http://www.beelerhealthygardens.com), a garden design and consulting company servicing residential and commercial clients in Ventura County, California.

Diane Beeler, principal of Beeler Healthy Gardens, stated “I am very pleased with the creation of my web site by RealWebMarketing.net. Thanks to the talent of the RealWebMarketing.net staff, my web site is increasing my business.  My focus is creating sustainable garden eco-systems that are organic, beautiful and low maintenance--sustainable gardens growing in harmony with nature. Regardless of style or theme, sustainable gardening practices (combining science-based best practices of organic gardening and integrated pest management with strong horticultural knowledge) result in a thriving garden that conserves resources, requires minimal maintenance and does not harm people, pets or the environment. Whether a client wants advice or services, their garden will benefit from science-based gardening practices that include the principles of integrated pest management (IPM), organic and sustainable gardening." 

Background:  Diane Beeler is a member of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, lectures throughout Ventura County on a variety of gardening topics, is a published garden writer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Ventura Botanical Gardens.  Diane has over 25 years’ horticultural experience, including residential and commercial design and maintenance. 

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for 21 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S. Services offered include pay-per-click advertising campaign management, web design and blog design, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, and optimized press releases.  

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RealWebMarketing.net Launches Website Marketing Campaign for Julian Construction

Campaign to Include Pay Per Click, Blogs, Article Directories, Optimized Press Releases & Social Media

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.RealWebMarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company located in Los Angeles, has launched a website marketing campaign for Julian Construction (http://www.JulianConstruction.com), a construction company in Los Angeles that specializes in home foundation repair, replacement and construction.

The campaign for Julian Construction will include pay per click advertising, blogs, article marketing with article directories, online PR with optimized press releases, and social media marketing utilizing Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net stated, “Julian Construction partner Shawn Kyles wanted professional help with Google AdWords, and to build up the organic traffic to his web site. So we have developed a campaign in order to build up links to his site, utilizing blogs, article marketing, online PR and social media. I believe that in this economic environment, it is more important than ever to keep promoting and not cut back or cut off your promotional efforts.”

Shawn Kyles of Julian Construction stated “We believe that promotion is vital. In the home improvement industry, if you don’t promote, you don’t get leads and you don’t get business. We believe that by promoting heavily on the Internet, that we will be poised to take advantage of the current economic situation while our competitors are cutting back. And we’re pleased with the way the campaign is going so far.”

Julian Construction was founded in 2001 with the goal of making safer homes, apartments and commercial properties throughout Southern California. Shawn Kyles has inspected over 15,000 structures, working with both engineering firms and local departments of building and safety, and is an expert in foundation repair and house bolting. Julian Construction owns its own company and is built on a “no middlemen” model - no salesmen, no subcontractors. When you work with Julian Construction you get the principals of the company and workers of Julian Construction under your home.  The result is the highest quality work at affordable prices.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 21 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, pool remodeling, and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include web design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

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How a Blog Creates Traffic to Your Site

by John Eberhard

Every web site owner would like to increase the amount of traffic to his or her site. I have been pushing the idea for a year or so that creating a blog, and then posting content to it on a regular basis, drives traffic to your web site. But I find that even people for whom I have created and set up blogs don’t get how or why this happens. So I am devoting this entire article to explaining how this works.

First of all, a blog is a special type of web site that makes it easy for you to add new content on a regular basis. New content gets added at the top, and you scroll down to see the older content. It also allows visitors to leave comments, and older content gets automatically archived.

Wordpress is one of the most common blogging systems, allowing you to put up a blog within your web site, as a subfolder (http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog). Typepad is another common blogging system, allowing you to either having it set up under Typepad’s URL (http://yourblogname.typepad.com) or you can set up a separate web address for the blog (http://www.yourblogname.com). Typepad charges a monthly fee.

There are also several free blogging sites, where you can set up a blog, such as Blogger.com and Tumblr.com, and then your blog URL is something like http://yourblogname.blogspot.com or http://yourblogname.tumblr.com. But these sites are much more limited in the features and design templates you can use. In other words, it’s much harder to customize the blog to your needs than with Wordpress or Typepad.

Blog design: When setting up a blog it is wise to design it with one or two sidebars, then add your contact information, and several links to features on your main web site. For example you could link to your home page, your “about us” page, your services page, and so on. If you sell any items such as books you can put an ad for the book in one of the sidebars. You want to set up the blog in such a way that as many people as possible who come to the blog also go over to your web site.

OK, now your blog is set up, with contact info and links to your main web site and all that. Now what?

Now, you put new content up on your blog regularly. By regularly, ideally I mean once a week or more often. Content can be anything from a long article (700-1,000 words), to a press release, to a shorter post or comment about something related to the topic of your blog (100-200 words). You can also post a link to some other content on some other web site or blog that you found that you want to tell your readers about. You can also post a video right in your blog, by taking the code that appears to the right of a video on YouTube.

OK, now there’s new content on the blog. So how is that going to drive traffic? Just putting up new content is going to drive people to the blog, right?

Well normally that would be true, but in the case of blogs that are about 20 search engines that are geared just to blogs. If you notify them, with what is called a “ping,” those search engines will all stop by your blog immediately and include your new article, shorter post, or whatever you put up there, in their search engine listings. There is a site called www.pingomatic.com that allows you to easily send a ping to 22 of these search engines.

This means that if your article was about how to lower your golf score, and someone went to one of these blog search engines and typed in “how to lower your golf score,” and your article contained that phrase, your listing would come up, allowing that person to click through and come to your blog.

So you can see that it is important to include high traffic keywords in your blog posts, and it is important to do some research and find out what the high traffic keywords are for your topic or industry.

So this is all nice theory, but does it really work?

Well I have two blogs for my marketing business, one for articles and a separate one for press releases. I post something to one of the two blogs a minimum of once a week or more. And I always send a ping to all of the blog search engines after every single post.

I checked my Google Analytics statistics for the entire year of 2009 up to today, and my two blogs have generated more traffic to my main web site, than any other source. In fact, if you add them up, it is three times the traffic that I got from Google.

So yes it does work, it is very powerful, and you can do it. But if you do set up a blog, remember, you have to post to it once a week, to get regular benefit and build up momentum. Good luck.

 

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Is Your Business Right for Pay Per Click Advertising?

by John Eberhard

It’s tempting to think that any business would be right for doing pay per click advertising (PPC) on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center or Facebook. It would be nice if it were so. But this is not the case. Some businesses get great results with PPC, but some do poorly. Here is a summary of a couple of factors that determine which types of businesses will do well.

a. High Ticket Items: Generally, high ticket items do much better with PPC campaigns than low ticket items. By low ticket items I mean anything below let’s say $200. The reason for this is that there is a fair amount of competition from other advertisers on Google AdWords and the other providers these days. Since the amount you pay for each person who clicks on your ad is driven by bids, more competition means higher cost per click.

Let’s say for instance that you have to pay $1.00 for every person who clicks on your ad. And let’s say you are selling an item on your website for $100. Not every person who clicks on your ad and comes to your website is going to buy the product. The percentage of people who come to your site who end up buying the product is called the conversion ratio. A typical conversion ratio for selling products directly on a website these days is anywhere from 0.5% to 3%. A 0.5% conversion ratio means that for every 200 people who come to your site, one will buy.

So if you were paying $1.00 for each person who clicked on your ad, then your cost for getting 200 people to the site via PPC would be $200. So now you get one sale out of those 200 people. Now let’s say your profit margin for that $100 product you’re selling is $50. You just spent $200 (which is in this case your cost per sale) but only made $50. So under this scenario you would lose money on every sale. Not a good business model.

The cost per click that you will end up paying varies quite a bit for various products, but $1.00 is not unusual (sometimes it’s less). So if you are selling CDs, books, or other low ticket items online, then PPC is definitely not the right route for you. There are other avenues such as blogging that will be much more cost effective.

But now let’s take a situation where you are selling a consulting service and the average sale is $3,000. Or let’s say you are a home improvement company and your average project is valued at $5,000. You can use a PPC campaign to generate leads, getting people to fill out a form for more information or to get some free item (like a free report) you are giving away that relates to your product or service.

In that case you can afford to do pay per click, because your sale amount and profit margin are higher. In a lead generation campaign the important factors at the end of the day are: how many leads you’re getting, and what is your cost per lead? Typically, depending on the industry and how many competitors there are in the geographical area in which you’re advertising, you can figure that your cost per lead will be anywhere from $10 up to $150. The most common is between $50 and $100. I know that’s broad, but it really does vary widely and depend on your industry and competition.

Budget: One aspect of all the pay per click programs is that you can set a daily budget, and thus a monthly budget to control how much money you spend. This may seem strange, but I have observed that campaigns with a budget of less than $500 per month are almost uniformly unsuccessful. Campaigns with budgets of over $1,000, when all other factors are done correctly, are nearly uniformly successful. This may have something to do with a low budget not being high enough to get enough momentum going. But whatever the reason, I have observed this on many occasions. For this reason I usually will no longer take on managing a PPC campaign with a monthly budget below $1,000.

If your company and your products or services are a good fit, pay per click advertising can be a great source for leads and sales.

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Why You Need to Do Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is the process of creating links on other web sites that link to yours. These are known as “inbound links.”

Google states that the number of inbound links to your site is the most important criteria in their deciding how high your web site will rank on Google for any given keyword. The higher your ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines for the keywords related to your business, the more traffic you will get coming to your site from the search engines.

Being on the coveted page one on Google for a high traffic keyword is the sure route to lots of traffic for your web site. But unless you do pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, getting onto page one for a high traffic keyword is not an easy or immediate task.

The first thing you need to do before you start doing link building, is to do some keyword research. You need to find keywords that have some decent amount of traffic (i.e. a decent number of people typing in that keyword) but not a ton of competing sites. That is the gold you are mining for. Because a keyword that gets low traffic isn’t worth your time, and one that has a large number of competing sites – well you’re just not going to be able to rank well for it, no matter what you do.

Your Link Building Program

Once you have selected a group of keywords that you want to rank well for, now the task is to do search engine optimization on your site. Once that is done, it is equally if not more important to do link building. Your link building program should consist of the following actions:

a. Blogs: Put up a blog for your company, with lots of links to your main web site in the sidebars. Then post something to it once a week or more, making sure you use the keywords in the post that you are trying to rank well for. Make those keywords link to an appropriate page on your web site.

b. Free Blogs: I have started a technique recently of putting up blogs on free blog sites like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and so on. Then I hook these up to another site where I can post my article once and it automatically goes out to all the free blogs that I set up. I include my keywords in the article, linking to my main site. This post goes out to 6 blogs of mine, and if I put three links to my site in the article, that means I just created 18 new links.

c. Press Releases: Write a press release once a week and put it on your blog (or all your free blogs per #2 above), then submit it to several online PR sites. These create high quality links to your web site.

d. Put up a Facebook fan page, which always ranks highly in search engines as a link to your site. Just a note of caution, which is that everybody and their mother is putting these up today and emailing everyone on their friend list to become a fan. But they still count as an excellent link to your site.

e. Article Marketing: Post your article on article directories like www.goarticles.com. This is not as popular as it was 2-3 years ago, but I still do it for my own site and several of my clients, and find it still works just as well as it did 2-3 years ago. Each article posting contains a “bio box” which has your name, a brief bio, your company name, and 1-3 links to your web site or sites. Using this technique I can get a site with 100 or fewer links up to several thousand in 2-3 months.

Link building experts used to do what was called “reciprocal linking.” This is where you offer to some other web site owner to put up a link to his web site on yours, and he would then put up a link to you. Google changed their policy and has significantly downgraded the value of these types of links a year and a half ago, so they are no longer effective.

Summary

If you have never done any link building actions, your site likely has a couple hundred links or less to it. What you really need in terms of links depends on how many links the sites of your competitors have. But most sites need at least 5,000 or more links to start ranking for their keywords. Link building is a process you have to work on over a period of time, and you have to have patience. I find that it is good to have a list of keywords you are trying to rank for, and then each month check your rankings for all those keywords on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then count up how many #1 keywords, top ten, top hundred, and top 500 you have. I use a software program called Market Samurai to do this. By doing that and tracking it each month you can see what progress you’re making.

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Why You Need to Do Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is the process of creating links on other web sites that link to yours. These are known as “inbound links.”

Google states that the number of inbound links to your site is the most important criteria in their deciding how high your web site will rank on Google for any given keyword. The higher your ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines for the keywords related to your business, the more traffic you will get coming to your site from the search engines.

Being on the coveted page one on Google for a high traffic keyword is the sure route to lots of traffic for your web site. But unless you do pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, getting onto page one for a high traffic keyword is not an easy or immediate task.

The first thing you need to do before you start doing link building, is to do some keyword research. You need to find keywords that have some decent amount of traffic (i.e. a decent number of people typing in that keyword) but not a ton of competing sites. That is the gold you are mining for. Because a keyword that gets low traffic isn’t worth your time, and one that has a large number of competing sites – well you’re just not going to be able to rank well for it, no matter what you do.

Your Link Building Program

Once you have selected a group of keywords that you want to rank well for, now the task is to do search engine optimization on your site. Once that is done, it is equally if not more important to do link building. Your link building program should consist of the following actions:

a. Blogs: Put up a blog for your company, with lots of links to your main web site in the sidebars. Then post something to it once a week or more, making sure you use the keywords in the post that you are trying to rank well for. Make those keywords link to an appropriate page on your web site.

b. Free Blogs: I have started a technique recently of putting up blogs on free blog sites like Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and so on. Then I hook these up to another site where I can post my article once and it automatically goes out to all the free blogs that I set up. I include my keywords in the article, linking to my main site. This post goes out to 6 blogs of mine, and if I put three links to my site in the article, that means I just created 18 new links.

c. Press Releases: Write a press release once a week and put it on your blog (or all your free blogs per #2 above), then submit it to several online PR sites. These create high quality links to your web site.

d. Put up a Facebook fan page, which always ranks highly in search engines as a link to your site. Just a note of caution, which is that everybody and their mother is putting these up today and emailing everyone on their friend list to become a fan. But they still count as an excellent link to your site.

e. Article Marketing: Post your article on article directories like www.goarticles.com. This is not as popular as it was 2-3 years ago, but I still do it for my own site and several of my clients, and find it still works just as well as it did 2-3 years ago. Each article posting contains a “bio box” which has your name, a brief bio, your company name, and 1-3 links to your web site or sites. Using this technique I can get a site with 100 or fewer links up to several thousand in 2-3 months.

Link building experts used to do what was called “reciprocal linking.” This is where you offer to some other web site owner to put up a link to his web site on yours, and he would then put up a link to you. Google changed their policy and has significantly downgraded the value of these types of links a year and a half ago, so they are no longer effective.

Summary

If you have never done any link building actions, your site likely has a couple hundred links or less to it. What you really need in terms of links depends on how many links the sites of your competitors have. But most sites need at least 5,000 or more links to start ranking for their keywords. Link building is a process you have to work on over a period of time, and you have to have patience. I find that it is good to have a list of keywords you are trying to rank for, and then each month check your rankings for all those keywords on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then count up how many #1 keywords, top ten, top hundred, and top 500 you have. I use a software program called Market Samurai to do this. By doing that and tracking it each month you can see what progress you’re making.

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Julian Construction Offers Earthquake Retrofitting to LA Homeowners

Urges Homeowners to Utilize Earthquake Retrofitting to Protect Homes from Earthquake Damage

Julian Construction (www.julianconstruction.com) is offering earthquake retrofitting services to homeowners in the greater Los Angeles area. An earthquake retrofit is the process of firmly attaching a house to its concrete foundation using foundation plates and anchor bolts. Because California is "earthquake country," the up-and-down and side-to-side motion of an earthquake can shake an unbolted house off its foundation, making for a very costly repair job.

In Southern California, small earthquakes are common. But we also know that the next “big one” could happen at any time, and probably when we least expect it, leaving widespread destruction in its wake. The last big Southern California quake was the Northridge Earthquake in January, 1994, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, and which caused 72 deaths, 9,000 injuries and $20 billion in damage. Whole apartment buildings and parking structures collapsed.

Julian Construction founder Julian De La Torre lists out indicators that an earthquake retrofit is probably necessary for your home: “Homes built before the mid 1980's often lack features that could help to make them earthquake damage resistant. Homes built before World War II may not even be bolted to the foundation at all, or the bolts may be too small and few. A major earthquake could slide such a house right off its foundation. An unreinforced garage with living space above is another possibly dangerous problem. That big garage door opening needs to be reinforced either by a steel frame or by strengthening the walls on either side or it can collapse in an earthquake like a house of cards, along with the living space on top. An unreinforced stone or masonry building definitely needs to be looked at, and is highly susceptible to earthquake damage.”

Julian also listed out some other conditions that could cause problems in an earthquake:

• Two or more stories
• Any support posts, instead of walls
• No foundation, or a block or brick foundation
• An unusual shape
• A location on a steep hill
• Living area over a garage
• A porch that is recessed under a second story
• A neighboring structure touching or almost touching.

Julian Construction offers free home foundation inspections for those who need or want their years of expertise. “Getting your home foundation inspected is the best thing you can do to ensure your home will be as ready as possible for the next earthquake. We also provide 0% financing for those who need to finance their any needed repair or retrofit.” Julian noted.

Julian De La Torre has been doing earthquake retrofitting since the early 1990s and has personally worked on over 6,600 homes in Southern California. With this unmatched experience in the substructure areas of a home, Julian formed Julian Construction in 2001 with the goal of making safer homes, apartments and commercial properties throughout Southern California. His partner Shawn Kyles has inspected over 15,000 structures, working with both engineering firms and local departments of building and safety, and is an expert in foundation repair and house bolting. Julian Construction owns its own company and is built on a “no middlemen” model - no salesmen, no subcontractors. When you work with Julian Construction you get the principals of the company and workers of Julian Construction under your home.  The result is the highest quality work at affordable prices. They can be contacted by phone at 323 733-3377, by fax at 323 733-4477 or via their website, www.julianconstruction.com.

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Blogs: Use Them or Lose Them

by John Eberhard

I have written a number of articles about the benefits of blogs:

1. You write something and post to your blog regularly.
2. You have your blog set up so there are numerous links back to your main site in the sidebars. Plus you write your blog posts so that you link back to your main site within each post.
3. Every time you post something new on the blog, you go to a site called www.pingomatic.com, and use it to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines like Technorati.com. This causes them to include your new blog post in their search engines right away.
4. The combination of posting regularly, i.e. once a week, plus pinging the blog search engines, drives significant traffic to your blog, which in turn drives traffic to your web site. I have two blogs for my marketing business and month to month the blogs routinely are the #1 or #2 driver of traffic to my web site, running neck and neck with Google.

So this is all nice and wonderful. But a major breakdown occurs here if you do not post something to the blog regularly. Ideally this is once a week or more. If you post something to the blog once a week or more, you will start to really drive traffic and you will develop fans who follow what you write.

Unfortunately I have set up blogs for some clients who have then posted one or two things on it and then forgotten the blog for months (you know who you are). This defeats the purpose of a blog and is really a waste of a valuable resource for driving traffic to a web site.

So here are some tips on generating content for that blog on a regular basis:

1. I find that in my work with clients, something that happens with a client over the course of each week will often be a good topic for a blog and newsletter article.
2. A blog post can be anything from a long article (300-700 words), to a short comment on something (100-200 words).
3. If you find a video on YouTube or somewhere else that would be of interest to readers of your blog, then post the video on your blog. On YouTube, to the right of the video you can find the HTML code. When you go to post to your blog, select HTML editing, then paste that code there, and the video player will appear right in your blog. If you want to post a comment about the video, type your comment in using the text editor, then switch over to the HTML editor and paste in the code from YouTube.
4. You can post links to interesting articles elsewhere on the web, that relate to your blog topic. However, I will say that I see some other people doing this, especially on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s all they ever do. My reaction is “Don’t you ever write any content yourself?” So this is good to do, but don’t make that the only thing you do.
5. You can do a Google search related to your topic and see what other items come up, or go to other web sites related to your topic, and get ideas for articles or shorter posts. You can also go to article directories like www.goarticles.com and search for articles related to your topic. But don’t steal an article or plagiarize it. Just use these for ideas.

Use these tips to write some new content for your blog regularly, at least once or twice a month, preferable once a week or more. The more often you post things to your (pinging each time), the more traffic you will drive to your blog and site.

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The October 15 Great California Shakeout Earthquake Drill a Great Success

Julian Construction Gives a Shout Out for the Shakeout and its Organizing Force, The Earthquake Country Alliance

Founder of Julian Construction (www.julianconstruction.com), Julian De La Torre, applauds the Great California Shakeout – the largest earthquake drill in US history. “More than 6.8 million people participated in the first statewide earthquake preparedness drill – that’s spectacular.” De La Torre said. “You really have to stand in awe of what the Earthquake Country Alliance has done in California, a state where it can often be a problem getting three people doing the same thing at the same time.”

For Julian Construction, every day is an earthquake preparedness day. Inspection of home foundations for their capacity to withstand earthquakes is one of primary parts of their business. “For all the success we had this year, it goes without saying that there are a lot more people in California than 6.8 million. So we are looking for even greater participation next year – Oct 21, 2010 is the next Great California Shakeout drill.” Julian said.

But there is no need for homeowners and renters to wait a year to prepare. Julian Construction recommends two websites that provide information on do-it-yourself preparedness inspections - Emergency Survival Program’s ‘Is Your Place Safe’ (http://www.scec.org/education/public/espfocus/May_06.pdf) and Earthquake Country Alliance’s Dare to Prepare website http://www.earthquakecountry.info/daretoprepare/secure_your_building.html).

Julian Construction offers free home foundation inspections for those who need or want their years of expertise. “Getting your home foundation inspected is the best thing you can do to ensure your home will be as ready as possible for the next earthquake. We also provide 0% financing for those who need to finance their any needed repair or retrofit.” Julian noted.

Julian De La Torre has been doing earthquake retrofitting since the early 1990s and has personally worked on over 6,600 homes in Southern California. With this unmatched experience in the substructure areas of a home, Julian formed Julian Construction in 2001 with the goal of making safer homes, apartments and commercial properties throughout Southern California. His partner Shawn Kyles has inspected over 15,000 structures, working with both engineering firms and local departments of building and safety, and is an expert in foundation repair and house bolting. Julian Construction owns its own company and is built on a “no middlemen” model - no salesmen, no subcontractors. When you work with Julian Construction you get the principals of the company and workers of Julian Construction under your home.  The result is the highest quality work at affordable prices. They can be contacted by phone at 323 733-3377, by fax at 323 733-4477 or via their website, www.julianconstruction.com.

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Aero & Marine Tax Professionals to Present “Plane Dollars and Sense” Aviation Seminar

Presentation to Take Place at Jet Center Medford in Medford, OR on October 29

MEDFORD, OR: Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, (http://www.aeromarinetaxpros.com) the pre-eminent experts in helping purchasers of aircraft and vessels to avoid paying sales and use tax in California, will be presenting a complimentary aviation seminar entitled “Plane Dollars and Sense”, at Jet Center Medford, on October 29 from 11am to 4pm.

The Aero & Marine Tax Professionals seminar will be geared to presenting information of value to aircraft owners and purchasers. The “Plane Dollars and Sense” Aviation Seminar will be presented by President and CEO Tom Alston, and Vice President Warren Alston, and will cover the following topics:

• Aircraft Financing
• The Basics of Buying, Selling and Marketing Jets
• 1031 Exchange
• Ownership Structures that Maximize Tax Benefits
• California Sales/Use Tax
• Document Program to Support Your Aviation Expenses

The seminar will be held from 11am to 4pm, and is complimentary, but seating is limited. The seminar is being hosted by Jet Center Medford and will be held at 5000 Cirrus Drive, Medford, OR 97504. Those interested in attending the seminar should RSVP to flyandsave@gmail.com.

Thomas Alston, President of Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, stated “We have worked with thousands of individuals and companies purchasing aircraft, helping them to avoid paying aircraft sales tax on their purchase, and this can add up to a significant amount of money. For clients who have followed our instructions to the letter, we have a 100% success rate. We urge people who are in the process of buying an aircraft or are considering a purchase to attend this seminar and get the facts on saving money.”

Aero & Marine Tax Professionals shows purchasers how to avoid California aircraft tax and to make certain the full value of their next aircraft, vehicle or vessel goes into their pocket--not the Government's. They have successfully filed hundreds of tax returns with the California State Board of Equalization. Mr. Alston has also published many articles on sales and use tax.

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Affordable Surveys

by John Eberhard

I recently wrote an article about how important it is for businesses to conduct market research surveys of their target public now, because the so-called “recession,” whether you believe in it or not, has changed people’s attitudes about buying things.

So if you are promoting to your public the same way you have been for the last 3-5 years, you are most likely going to be missing the mark, because the public’s attitudes have changed. So your advertising message might be geared to the way their attitudes were a year or two or three ago.

Most business owners know that conducting surveys can tend to be expensive. But over the last few years I have been conducting surveys in a much more affordable fashion. Here’s how:

1. Find an email list of the right target public. By the right target public, I mean the type of person who tends to buy your products or services. If you’re a veterinarian, the target public is pet owners who live near your practice. If you are a business consultant, your target public might be small business owners. And so on. The trick is to find an email list of that public that you can buy or rent. If you are lucky you might already have a usable list. Figure that the list needs to be at least 10 to 20 times as large as the number of surveys you want to get done.

1. Write a survey that will find out things like what benefits your public think they will get from your product or service, or what problems they experience that your product or service solves. I recommend getting help in the writing of the survey from someone with a lot of experience in this area. Make sure you include questions related to their attitudes about buying your product or service in this economic climate.

1. Work out some item that you can offer to the people you will be emailing, as an incentive to get them to fill out the survey. Maybe 5-10 years ago you could just ask people to fill out the survey and you’d get lots of people doing it. But from my experience, today, you need to give the person some kind of incentive to do it. If you have some kind of desirable information product such as a report or white paper, that could work. Over the past few years I have offered a nice pen (with the logo and phone number of the company doing the survey), and I have also offered a $5 Starbucks card. Both have worked very well and I got plenty of surveys done. You can state that only the first 30 or 50 people who fill out the survey get the incentive. When you look at the fact that most phone surveys today cost $10-15 each or more, a $5 Starbucks card is a bargain.

1. Put the survey up on a web page form. Make sure you include fields for the person’s physical street address if you are offering some physical item such as a pen or Starbucks card as an incentive.

1. Create your email that you’ll be sending out to the email list. Make this an HTML email (that looks like a web page) so you can include a picture of whatever spiff you’re offering as an incentive.

1. Send out the email. Collect and tabulate your surveys. Analyze the results and find what the public’s attitudes are now. Find a way to modify your message to address their current attitudes and concerns.

Good hunting.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

How Much Traffic is Coming to Your Web Site?

By John Eberhard

One of the most important aspects of managing a web site is finding out and then monitoring regularly, how much traffic is coming to the site.

I have written some articles on Google Analytics, which is what I recommend for web statistics, because it is quite good, it is free, and most other web statistics software and services are pretty expensive. And the free ones you get with most hosting plans usually are pretty awful.

So you set up a Google Analytics account, then it will give you some HTML code which you put on every page of your site and which is invisible to users. Then it will start tracking your visitors, which pages they are viewing, where they come from, and which keywords they typed in if they found you on a search engine.

I recommend tracking how many visitors your site is getting weekly and graph this. You may wonder if the number of visitors you are getting is a good number or a bad number. This depends entirely on what type of business you have, whether it is local or national, and other factors.

Now let’s say that you are using your web site to do lead generation, i.e. getting people to fill out a form giving you their contact information so your sales guy can contact them and sell them. Now that you know how many visitors you are getting per week, you can compare that to how many leads the site is generating. This gives you a conversion percentage for your web site overall. Take the number of leads and divide this by the number of visitors, and move the decimal over two places to the right. That gives you your conversion percentage.

A good conversion percentage for a web site is anywhere between 0.5% and 2.0%. A 0.5% conversion rate means that for every 200 visitors, one person would fill out your form and become a lead. 2.0% means that for 200 visitors, 4 people would fill out a form. If it’s higher than those percentages, that’s even better. Internet marketing guru Ed Dale, who recently ran his 30 Day Challenge training program in August, says that none of his businesses have ever gotten over 0.5% as a conversion percentage, and he has made millions online. I would say that for sites where you are doing lead generation, your conversion percentage would be higher and if you are directly selling products online, you percentage would be lower.

So armed with this information, you then know what to do to improve your online leads or sales.

For instance, let’s say your site is getting about 200 visitors a week, and generating one lead per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.5% which is an acceptable percentage. But one lead per week isn’t going to make anyone rich, so you know that your correct target is to get more traffic coming to your site, by doing things like pay per click advertising, writing blog articles, or putting out press releases.

On the other hand, let’s say your site is regularly getting 5,000 visitors per week, and generating 5 leads per week. That’s a conversion percentage of only 0.1% which is pretty poor. So in that case you would know that you have to make adjustments to the web site itself in order to entice more people to fill out a form or buy something. This would usually be along the lines of making your offers more prominent or coming up with brand new offers that are more appealing to your target public.

Having these statistics and monitoring them regularly also makes it possible to make changes to your operation, either changes to the web site to increase the conversion percentage, or changes to your promotional efforts to drive more people to the site, and then see how effective they were.

So if you make some changes to the site to increase the conversion percentage, but then your conversion percentage goes down, you know right away that you have to put the site back to the way it was before (always keep the older version of a web site when you make changes).

It’s usually good to make only one change at a time, so that if statistics go up as a result, you know what change made that happen.

By monitoring these statistics you can truly manage your web site and make it more productive for your business.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

What Types of Keywords Do You Need, and What Do You Do With Them?

By John Eberhard

Some of my past articles have dealt with how to find the right keywords for a web site. This article will cover what types of keywords you need for different uses and what to do with them.

Pay Per Click Keywords

The types of keywords that one needs tend to be different for pay per click advertising (PPC) or for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

With pay per click, one usually wants to use the most general keywords he can find that are applicable and relevant to what he is advertising. For example, if you are advertising a physical therapy practice in Glendale, CA, you would use keywords like “physical therapy,” “physical therapist,” or “physical therapy practice.”

With pay per click, you would not need to use keywords, for instance, that included the name of the town, i.e. “physical therapist Glendale,” and similar variations.

I recently reviewed a pay per click account that had been set up by someone else and it was set up with all these types of keywords that included the name of the city they were in, but didn’t even include the more general versions of those keywords. I’ve even seen other companies similar to mine offering to set up PPC accounts with all these keywords using the names of the city and surrounding cities, and charging you X amount for each keyword, as if that’s some kind of great thing. It’s not.

Here’s why. Keywords that include more words, such as “physical therapist Glendale” or any other similar keyword, tend to have lower numbers of impressions, meaning that fewer people are typing them in. This type of keyword is often referred to as a “long tail keyword,” and is desirable for SEO uses, as I’ll explain in a minute.

But to set up a pay per click account using ONLY long tail keywords (especially keywords using the names of cities or other geographical areas) is a mistake. Because Google AdWords (as well as most other pay per click systems) allows you to select the geographical location of where your ads will appear. So if you’re doing business in Glendale, CA, you can set up your campaign so it only appears to people in Glendale.

So if your physical therapist in Glendale sets up his account only using keywords with the word “Glendale” in them, he will be missing the much larger group of people who will just type in “physical therapist.” So he’ll be missing out on those potential visitors. In the example of this account that I reviewed, he wasn’t even getting enough impressions to use up his relatively small budget.

That’s not to say that you can’t use keywords with the name of the city in pay per click, but you don’t need to. Using what Google calls “broad match,” you’ll get those people anyway just using the phrase “physical therapist” because it will include every search that includes those words, which would include “physical therapist Glendale.”

Keywords in SEO

The type of keywords you use in SEO, however, is totally different. Here, you want to use more long tail keywords. The reason is that short, general keywords such as “physical therapist” or “golf” or “software” are extremely competitive, because when it comes to ranking well on search engines for a given keyword, it is not limited to just your local area. It is international. So every company in the world that sells those products or services is competing for those keywords. And some have been working at ranking for those keywords for a number of years. So your likelihood of being able to rank well for one of those general keywords is close to non-existent.

So the trick with SEO is to find keywords that are longer tail, have more words in them, and which have some decent amount of traffic but not as much competition.

So in our previous example, for SEO purposes the physical therapist would want to use keyword phrases such as “physical therapist Glendale,” because he is much more likely to be able to rank well for that keyword. You don’t have to use all keywords that list names of cities in them, but in general the long tail keyword is best. You want decent number of searches per day, but not tons of competition.

Summary

It’s important to understand the processes for pay per click and search engine optimization, and understand which types of keywords work best for each.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous