Internet Marketing On Into the New Decade

by John Eberhard

At this time of year I usually try to look forward into the coming year and predict or make a statement of what I think are going to be the most important Internet marketing strategies for the coming year.

While it is impossible to know what new technologies will be developed in the coming year, here’s an overview of my take on Internet marketing into the new decade.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC advertising continues to be a dominant aspect of Internet marketing, partly because you can directly control it, whereas with some other website marketing actions, you can only indirectly control them. PPC is a great fit for local companies of medium to large size. Google AdWords is the major player. Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center merged in October, now both under the banner of MSN. Facebook also has a pay per click advertising program. In some industries it does not work well because of excessive competition. I think it’s best to work with an experienced consultant.

2. Google Maps: This is a relatively new offering from Google. When they detect that your search is local in nature, i.e. you are searching for a local business such as a pizza restaurant or a dentist or a home improvement company, they will display a map showing where the local businesses are. The map is shown in the right hand column, with balloons marking where the businesses are. Then in the left hand column, the listings for those businesses appear, with balloons to show that they are associated with the map.

You have to go through a specific procedure to get your business on Google Maps. Just because you have a Google AdWords or Google Analytics account does not mean you will appear on Google Maps. It also helps to put up accounts on about 8-10 other specific sites, which Google recognizes, and that helps to push your Google Maps listing toward the top.

With local businesses, getting a listing on Google Maps is vital, because if you can get near the top of the Google Maps listings, it immediately puts your listing on page one of Google results.

3. SEO and Link Building: SEO and link building remain a vital aspect of getting your web site to rank well for your targeted keywords. SEO or search engine optimization means to select keywords for your business that have good traffic but not a ton of sites competing for them, then putting those keywords into specific areas of your web site.

Link building means to create links to your web site, on other web sites. Google says that the number of links to your site from other sites is the number one criteria they use in how high to rank your site for your keywords.

Many companies used to do what is called reciprocal link building, where you contact owners of other sites and offer to trade links. Google downgraded the value of these links about two years ago, so I don’t do this and don’t recommend it. But a lot of people still think this is what you do when you’re talking about link building.

The best methods for link building, in my opinion, continue to be article marketing and optimized press releases. These methods can be used to build your links up to 2,000-3,000 in just a couple months. I have heard of some new link building methods on the horizon and we’ll see how they shake out in the new year.

4. Blogging: Blogging continues to be a vital part of website marketing. You write anything from a short post (100-200 words) up to a full article (400 words or more) or a press release, and post them to your blog. The key is to write and post things on your blog regularly, i.e. once a week or more. Then you must notify the blog search engines that you have new content, using www.pingomatic.com. Wordpress sites allow you to do this automatically. You can also link up to 3 keywords in your post back to your main web site, which creates links.

5. Social Media Marketing: Facebook and Twitter remain the top social media sites. The trick in marketing your business through these is two-fold: 1) get lots of friends or followers, and 2) engage with your friend or follower group via regular communication. On Facebook, as an example, you can post things about your business, but you also have to post personal comments occasionally, like about your family or your vacations or whatever. If you only post things about your business, your friends will get bored with you or even remove you from their friends list. This is especially true if you are constantly asking people to buy your book or attend your webinar or sign up for your teleseminar. It is also vital to view the updates of other people and make comments about them occasionally. That’s part of the social media interaction or engagement. For Twitter I use a software program called Tweet Adder to build up followers. With this product I have built up my own Twitter account to 6,800 followers.

6. Email Marketing: This is still a very relevant and valid way to market your company. But in my opinion rented email lists no longer seem to have much punch. So I’m talking about developing your own in-house list of prospects and customers. You have to have some offerings on your web site that will entice people to give you their name and email address, such as a free email newsletter, free reports or white papers on topics related to your products or services, or free tools or software demos (for software companies). Then send them regular emails offering your services. Also, use one of the online email services like Aweber or Mailchimp.

That’s my summary of Internet marketing in the coming year. May the New Year be your most prosperous yet.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Pay Per Click Advertising – an Introduction

by John Eberhard

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of Pay Per Click Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines such as Google or MSN, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters "antivirus software", you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on many search engines, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as "sponsored links." That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term "antivirus software."

One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad.

One of the biggest advantages to pay per click (PPC) advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with Google or MSN, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With PPC advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, far-right column (and also with the top three results along the top), whereas the regular search results appear in the wider left-hand column. Google’s PPC program is called "AdWords."

There are a number of other benefits to this type of advertising. First of all, with search engines, one always has the advantage that the web visitor went there specifically to get information on what you sell. If you sell antivirus software and you can put your ad in front of people that are looking for antivirus software, it doesn’t get much more targeted than that.

Secondly, it is very easy and quick to get started. You can start an account and have your listings up and running within hours. And you don’t have to struggle through and worry about the myriad requirements of the search engines in order for you to be listed high in the regular or “organic” results. Not to say you can’t do that too, but what we’re saying is that PPC advertising is a lot easier and is very effective.

Getting Started

Google is the largest PPC program in that it has by far the most traffic. Yahoo Search Marketing recently merged with MSN Ad Center, so if you start an account on MSN your ads will also appear on Yahoo.

Determining Your Best Search Terms

One of the first things you will have to do is to select the key words or key phrases on which you will pay to have your ad appear. Here’s how we recommend you do this:

1. Try to adopt the viewpoint of a person who would be looking for your product or service. Think about what words or phrases they might type into a search engine in order to find your product or service. Start making a list.

2. Go to the web sites of one of the companies competing against you. From your browser select View | Source. This shows the HTML source code of that particular web page. Near the top you will see a paragraph like this:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pay per click search engines, pay
for placement, pay ranking search engines, bid position, pay per
click">

This is called the meta-tag area of a web page, which is hidden when you view the page normally but is visible when you select View | Source. Meta-tags on a web site help in order to achieve good rankings in the regular (non-paid) search results of a search engine.

After where it says CONTENT=, and within the quotation marks, are search terms or phrases that that company thinks are significant for their product or service. Those are phrases where they hope to appear near the top of the regular listings when people type those phrases into a search engine.

I used to advise people to go to a free site to see what the search numbers were for all the keywords before they got started with a Google AdWords account. Now I advise people to just put them all up in an ad campaign on Google and see how the numbers look after a week or so. Google also has a keyword tool which you can use once you start your account.

Bids and Bidding

For PPC advertising, during the process of setting up your account and your ads that are connected to specific key phrases, you will be asked how much money you want to bid for that keyword. In other words, how much money you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

In general, the higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear amongst all the ads of all the advertisers running ads for that keyword. It is definitely not necessary to be in the #1 position in order to get people coming to your web site.

In general we recommend bidding $1.00 per click when first setting up an account or new campaign. Then review your account over the next week and see how high that places your ads. And see if you are getting a fair number of clickthroughs. If your ad is appearing low and your clickthroughs are low, raise the bid.

Budgets

Google and MSN allow you to set a budget for your campaign. So figure out what you want to spend for your clickthroughs for a month and divide by 30, and that’s your daily budget.

I’m going to say some things that may discourage you from doing PPC advertising. In setting up and managing dozens and dozens of PPC accounts over the last 6 years, I have observed that you have to a monthly budget of a certain size in order for your campaigns to be successful.

In the beginning I used to have client accounts where their budget was $200 per month, $300, $400, etc. Hard experience has shown me that budgets of this size rarely work. For whatever reason, I have seen that accounts with small budgets like this have not had successful campaigns in about 80% of cases. I have seen that accounts with monthly budgets of over $1,000 have been successful in about 90% of cases.

I define a successful campaign as getting an adequate number of sales or leads, with a viable cost per lead or sale. So if you can only afford $200 or $300 per month, I’d advise you not to do PPC advertising. Wait until you can afford to do a larger budget.

Writing Your Ad

The next important issue is the writing of your ad. The ad will consist of a headline, ad text, and an Internet address. On Google AdWords, you get a strict limit of number of characters per line for the headline (25 characters including spaces), and two lines of text with 35 characters each.

The headline will appear in bold. So you want to grab the person’s attention with your headline. It is often a good idea to include the key phrase in the headline, though this is not a hard and fast rule.

One of the many advantages of pay per click advertising is that you can write your ad copy, and put the ad up, and then see what the response is, and if it does poorly, it basically doesn’t cost you anything.

You can experiment with different wording for your ad and your headline. Whenever you make a change, Google automatically records data on the change, so you can review your “change history” later to see which changes you made when. Then when your response goes up or down, you know what the change was that caused it and when that change was made.

Your Landing Page

When you set up your ad on Google or MSN, you will have to choose a "landing page" for the ad. That’s the page where the person lands when he clicks on your ad. A few tips on how to work your landing pages:

1. In all cases, it is best NOT to have the landing page be the home page of your site. We recommend to create a new page whose sole purpose is to be a landing page for that paid ad on one of the search engines.

2. Do not put navigation buttons on the landing page to the rest of your site. Design the page so that the only thing they can do on that page is fill out the form you want them to fill out. This will always increase response, and giving them full navigational buttons to every other page under the sun on your site will always lower response. Giving them only one option controls the process to a much greater degree.

3. Design the landing page so that there is a bit of sales text on the top of the page, including any graphics as needed, and then there is a phone number and a form on the lower part of the page. If possible, do not make them click through to yet another page to fill out the form or buy the product.

Geo-Targeting

Google and MSN now have a feature called geo-targeting, where, when you set up your campaign, you can select where your ads will appear geographically. So if you have a local business that sells to the public in the greater Los Angeles area, you can select the metro LA area and your ads will only appear there. This is very important so that you are not paying for people to click on your ads in places where you can’t sell your product or service to them.

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

On Google and MSN, by logging into your account you can see various statistics on your account. Here are the most important things to look for in measuring how you’re doing:

a. Impressions: These are the number of people that saw your ad, meaning they entered one of your specific keywords or phrases, and your ad appeared. You can see the total impressions by day, for the week, and you can break it out so you can see the impressions for specific key phrases.

High impressions means that you have selected key phrases that a lot of people are entering.

b. Clickthroughs: This means the number of people that, having seen your ad, clicked on it and arrived on your landing page. The search engines will show the clickthroughs as a raw number and also as a percentage compared to the impressions.

High clickthrough percentages means you have been successful in writing an ad that a good percentage of people were interested enough to click on, to go to your site.

c. Conversion Rate: This means the percentage of people that clicked through and went to your site, that actually did what you wanted them to do. If you are selling products right on the site, the conversion rate means what percentage of people that arrived there actually bought the product. If you are advertising to generate leads, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that clicked through that filled out the form and sent you their information.
In order to have this conversion rate information, you have to put what is called “conversion code” on your “thank you page” that people come to after they fill out your form. Many people don’t know about this (both Google and MSN have it) but it is a vital tool in measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The conversion rate is a measure of success of your landing page. If you are getting good conversion rates that means you have done a good job of writing and designing the landing page. If your conversion rate is poor, that means you need to look again at the landing page and figure out where you could change it to make it better, or at what points you might be losing people.

In our experience:

1. A good clickthrough percentage is anything over 0.5%. If you are getting 1.0% or better, that’s pretty good. If you are getting less than 0.5%, you should test some changes to your ad. Remember that a poor clickthrough percentage is a reflection of your search engine ad, not your landing page. So make changes to your ad, not your landing page, when trying to improve it.
2. A good conversion rate is anything from 3% to 5%. The highest conversion rate we have ever gotten on a web site is 50%. If you are getting 2% or less, you should test some changes to your landing page and try to improve it.

And likewise remember that a poor conversion rate is a reflection of your landing page, so make any needed changes there.

Summary

In the constantly changing landscape of the Internet and Internet marketing, pay per click advertising is currently a very successful tool. If you are selling a product or service that costs over $200, we recommend you try it.

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Building Quality Links with Online PR in 2011

by John Eberhard

Having links to your web site from other sites is very important. In fact, it is the primary factor used by Google in deciding your site's ranking for any given keyword.

In other articles I have discussed submitting articles to "article directories," also called "content hubs." This is a great way to build quantity links to your web site, as your articles appear on the content hubs themselves and they count as a link to you, plus your articles get downloaded and posted on other web sites and blogs.

Optimized press releases are a great way to build quality links to your web site. I recommend doing this in conjunction with submitting articles to article directories. That way, you're getting the quantity and quality links.

Online PR consists of writing optimized press releases, putting them out on a blog, and also submitting them to online PR or press release sites.

There are a fair number of web sites now that are public relations sites, where you can register, then submit press releases to them. These online PR sites serve several purposes:

a.Journalists can use them to find interesting news stories, which they will then print in other news outlets, including web sites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV stations.

b.When you submit a press release to an online PR site, the content from these press releases can get into Google News and other big news sites, where it then influences the search engine rankings for your web site.

c. These online PR sites rank really well on search engines, so your release will rank highly.

Optimized Press Releases

An "optimized press release" is a press release which announces an event of some kind, and which contains your selected high priority keywords. These are the keywords that you would like your web site to rank highly for in the regular search engine results pages (SERPs).

By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.

It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and continue doing this over a several month period. But if you can’t do this every week, once or twice a month is still very helpful.

Blogs: How They Work

One important thing to do with a press release is to put it on your blog. Blogs are treated as more important than a regular web site by the search engines, as they tend to be updated more regularly with new information. And the people running the major search engines consider fresh content to be very important.

I used to take new articles on my site and client sites and put them into an RSS feed, which stands for “really simple syndication.” However, I don’t bother with this anymore because all blogs create an RSS feed automatically and update it every time you put a new post on the blog. But for people who are interested, they can pull your RSS feed into an RSS feed reader, which is a handy way to review new content from selected sources that you want to follow.

After you post a new press release on your blog, you want to ping (send a notification out to) the blog search engines. There are about 30 of these specialized search engines. This then gets your latest article or release listed in the blog search engines. Wordpress blogs can be configured to do this automatically every time you post something. For other blogs you can use the site www.pingomatic.com which only takes a minute and is free.

The key things to keep in mind with online PR and optimized press releases are:

1. Write a new release frequently. Weekly is best.

2. Use the keywords in the release that you want to be ranking highly for.

3. Submit the press release to at least one free online PR site. Select one that will get the content into Google News. We submit client releases to 5 sites.

4. Put the article up onto your blog.

5. Ping the blog search engines.

6. Repeat the process each week and keep it up for several months. This will really start to raise your rankings for the keywords you are targeting in your optimized press releases.

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Tracking the Success of Your Web Site 2011

by John Eberhard

Now that you have a web site and you are trying to get people to come to it and become leads, or sales, or just to use the site, it is vital to be able to measure how well you are doing each week. By watching your web site statistics, you can gauge how well each new change you make to the site or to your promotional efforts is working. You can reinforce the things that are working well and drop the things that aren't.

Following Your Statistics

It is vital to have a good statistics program to be able to track the statistics of visits to your site. I used to recommend several programs or services for this purpose, but Google Analytics is a free service from Google and is quite good, so I recommend to everyone to set up Analytics on their web sites now. It just takes an hour or two to set it up, although you need to have the right software to do it.

By using Google Analytics you can really see what's happening with your site daily, weekly, monthly, or for even longer periods.

The key statistics you want to be able to track weekly include:

1. User Sessions: This is the number of people that came to your site in a given week. Some statistics programs track the total number of User Sessions, which can include multiple sessions from one person, and others track unique User Sessions, meaning they count each user only once. I personally think total User Sessions is more valuable as a statistic, because theoretically you want people to keep coming back. Analytics can tell you both.

2. Page Views: This is the total number of pages that people looked at on your web site in a given period of time. This of course will always be higher than the User Sessions unless your site only has one page (I would hope it has more). Obviously, the higher the Page Views are in relation to your User Sessions, the better. That shows that people are staying on your site and looking around, not just coming to your home page and then leaving.

3. Referrals: Analytics allows you to see what other web sites people are coming to you from. These could include search engines or other sites where there is a link to your site. This is probably the most important thing to monitor on your web site, because it shows you how successful your online marketing actions are.

4. Page Views by Page: You should check out how many Page Views each individual page on your site is getting. This shows how well people are moving around the site and which pages are attracting the most attention. This is especially important as you put up new features and new pages and you can see how people are responding to them.

Analytics will also show you which pages most people entered the site through, and which pages they exited the site from. This is important because if you see that most people are coming to your home page and also exiting the site from your home page, it shows you are not enticing them to stay. That tells you that you need to make the choices on the home page more interesting or more appealing. You should use market research surveys to tell you what your public wants, and then use that information to get them to stay and move around the site.

5. Keywords: I like to look at what keywords people used to find your site on search engines. This gives you an idea of which keywords you are currently ranking well for on the search engines.

6. Sales or Leads: Some sites are set up to generate leads, i.e. people responding that your salespersons can call, while other sites are set up to generate sales directly online. Which one you have usually depends on the price range of the product or service. For higher prices you usually need a salesperson to bring home the sale, whereas with lower prices you can get people to buy it online.

Whichever one you have from your site: leads or sales, you should track these weekly and see how the various actions you are doing or changes that you are making are contributing to or detracting from your online leads or sales, and manage accordingly.

Tracking statistics from your web site is vital to your overall website marketing success and should be done at least once a week.

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Pay Per Click Conversions

by John Eberhard

When you’re doing pay per click (PPC) advertising with Google AdWords or MSN Ad Center, the end product that you are shooting for is a conversion. If you are selling products on your web site, a conversion is an online sale. If you are doing lead generation on your web site, meaning you are getting people to respond and give you their name and contact info so you can call and sell them, then a conversion is a lead.

If you are using Google’s optional Conversion Code (which anyone should) you can see exactly which campaign and which ad and even which keyword your conversions are coming from. You can see your cost of lead as well, meaning your total cost spent on Google clicks, divided by the number of leads or sales you got.

Of course you want to get the most possible conversions in a given period of time and you want the lowest possible cost per conversion. The cost per conversion varies wildly according to the industry.

The very first thing to know about conversions is that it is entirely the job of your landing page to get the conversions. Assuming that your ads are working and that you have the right keywords and that you have an adequate number of people arriving on your landing page, if your conversions are still low, then you tinker with the landing page, not with the ads or the keywords or the bids.

For years I have advocated an approach of having a customized landing page and that is where you have your PPC visitors land. You do not have them land on your home page. This is the more or less generally accepted viewpoint today, with people who have the visitor land on their home page viewed as an “amateur.”

The reason why you need a customized landing page is quite simply that you will get a higher percentage of conversions if you do it that way. Here are the criteria for an effective landing page:

1. It should not be the home page, but a customized page made especially for PPC advertising.
2. It should have sales text and pictures specifically about the product being offered by your PPC campaign. It would be similar to a “product detail” page within your site that talks about this specific product. In other words, there should be a direct connection between the ad they saw on Google and what they see when they land on your landing page.
3. I usually put a form on that page so the person can fill it out right there without having to click to another page. That’s for lead generation. For selling products you want to allow them to buy the product right on that page if possible, or if not, have a large button “click here to buy” or something similar that links directly to the exact page of your shopping cart where they can buy that product. Make it easy and obvious for them on how to become a conversion.
4. No navigation buttons. I get more argument from new clients about this than any other topic. Over the years of doing PPC management (and before that email marketing which is similar when it comes to landing pages) I observed, when we studied the web statistics, that often people would land on our landing pages, then wander around the site, then leave. Rarely would people come back to the landing page, or go to any of the other form pages on the site, and fill one out. They wandered around, and left. So we tried it out with no navigational buttons, so the only choice they had was to do what we wanted them to do, which was fill out the form and become a conversion. Our conversion percentages went way up. But clients sometimes argue with me that they wouldn’t like it if they landed on a landing page and couldn’t wander around the site, so they wouldn’t want to do it to others. So if the client has been really insistent, we have set it up both ways and tested it. Without navigation works better in about 90% of all cases, with the other 10% being mostly companies that highly visible products like landscaping, where the prospect is going to want to look at photo galleries.

Remember, if you have an adequate number of people clicking on your ads and coming to your landing page, but no or few conversions, the fault is with the landing page. Make a change to the landing page, keep to the rules above, and see your conversions increase.

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Capturing Identities on a Web Site in 2010 and Beyond

by John Eberhard

One of the most vitally important - and often neglected - aspects of designing a web site and website marketing is to include ways to capture identities of people visiting the site. This means to get the name and email address (minimally) of people who visit the site, so you can promote your product or service to them in the future.

Most sites should be set up, first of all, so that you can either capture a lead, i.e. someone interested in buying your product, or the site should allow people to buy directly online.

But even with people who theoretically don’t want to pitched on your product by a salesman right now, or who don’t want to buy your product directly online right now, you can often entice them to fill out a form with some kind of offer and give you their email address.

 The Solution

The solution is to include reasons on your site for the person who is interested, but not going to buy right away, to give you his name and email address now. This allows you to build an email list, which over time, can become a formidable part of your marketing strategy, because you can email to those people for free.

Here are some different ways you can capture the identities of people who aren't going to buy right now:

1. Offering a free email newsletter subscription. This is probably the most important solution and the one that is applicable to the most types of web sites. Offer a free email newsletter containing information articles and news about your industry or subject matter, or specifically about your company or products. Then put a small form in your sidebar, so it appears on every page.

Then put out the newsletter on a regular basis, usually monthly. In all probability there is someone in your company who can write information articles that will interest your public. You should sign up with one of the online emailing services. I have found that Mailchimp and Aweber are the best.

2. Offer software demos. If you are a software vendor, offering free software demos is a great way to collect names. And of course all the people signing up are interested in the product.

3. Offer free information products. Web surfers, for the most part, are already looking for information. Offering free articles, white papers, e-books, etc., is a great way to generate interest in your product and collect email addresses. And of course, the articles, white papers or e-books should be on the topic of your product or service. That way you are pre-qualifying the people who respond, as someone who would be interested in the product.

The key to an identity capturing strategy is to find free things that will appeal to the public that is coming to your web site, and get them up there. Then, keep statistics on each offer and how many responses it gets.

I don't recommend offering free items that cost you money to acquire or deliver, like T-shirts, pens, hard-copy books, etc. If possible come up with something you can offer for free, that can be downloaded from your web site (once they give you their name and email address).

You can measure how many people are coming to the site and what your conversion rate is. In other words, you can measure what percentage of the people coming to the site are either buying something from you or giving you their email address.

Your Marketing Strategy Once You Start Collecting a List

Being able to work with these strategies requires the ability to see the big picture and stick to a plan by envisioning the gains in the future. You might start out with zero list, but by developing some offers and methodically collecting all the names, week after week, you will develop a very valuable resource. For example, one company I worked with started out with no list, and 18 months later had over 300,000 names. And believe me, that's a hell of a promotional resource! Because for one thing, you can email out to them regularly virtually for free!

OK, now let's say that you have some free offers up there on the site and you're getting people signing up for your newsletter or whatever.

The first thing to do is to put those names onto a list. Depending on what you're offering, you might want to make a separate list for each of the offers. Use one of the online email services for this. Both Aweber and Mailchimp allow you to set up a series of email letters going out to them - one today, one in 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, etc. Each one gives a bit more data about your products or services and sells them.

The beauty of an autoresponder system and setting up a series of sales letters to go out to the people who respond, is that it sells your product on an automated basis. Once you write the letters and set it up, it just goes, selling the product without you having to do much.

But beyond setting up an autoresponder, the concept or strategy is just to start sending out regular emails to your list, selling your products and services. Create a series of emails to send to the list.

Good luck with the establishment of your email list.

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Growing Your Business Using the Internet

by John Eberhard

If you have a small or medium sized business, here is a summary of the website marketing actions you can take online to grow your business.

Google Maps

If you have a business that serves a local community, such as a restaurant, a health care practice, or a home improvement company, probably the first thing you should do is to set up a Google Maps account (and save the login info so you can get in later and make adjustments).

Google has created Google Maps recently so that whenever someone types in a search query that appears to be a local business, either by the nature of the business (pizza, plumber) or by the fact that searcher included the name of a city, they will provide a Google Map. And just recently they changed the format to make the Google Maps listings look like regular organic listings in the left hand column. So if you’re a local business, this is the place to be.

By the way, there is a formula to getting your listing to the top. And failing this, in competitive areas you can find your listing doesn’t even appear on the first page. Contact us for more details.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising (PPC) on Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center (just merged with Yahoo Search Marketing) and Facebook, is a great way to drive traffic and get leads. However, due to the competition which has driven up the bid costs, for the most part this works best for promoting high ticket items these days, i.e. items over say $500. I do have some clients using PPC where the cost per lead is very low and it’s working for a low ticket item, but these are in the minority.

So PPC is a great way to drive traffic for businesses like home improvement companies, health care practices, or consulting companies. And it can be set up and start generating leads fast, i.e. in a couple of days.

For the right types of businesses pay per click can provide a constant flow of good quality leads or sales, month in and month out. If you’re not sure PPC is right for your business, contact me.

Blogging

Blogging can be a great way to drive traffic to your web site. Here’s the formula:

1. Write something to post on the blog at least once a week.
2. If your blog is a Wordpress blog, make sure it is configured to send out notifications (called “pings”) to blog search engines after every post. If your blog is not a Wordpress blog, use www.pingomatic.com to send out pings after every single post.
3. Have your blog set up so that you have links to your main web site in the sidebars.
4. Have a picture of yourself on the blog to personalize it.

If you follow this formula you can drive a high volume of traffic to your blog and best of all, once your blog is all set up, posting to it is free.

SEO and Link Building

I don’t like it, but I have to accept that many people have sort of merged these two terms together, with link building now sort of considered to be a part of SEO. To clarify, search engine optimization, or SEO, consists of keyword research to find the best keywords to use, then inserting those keywords in all the appropriate places on your web site so it will have a better chance at ranking well on the search engines for those keywords.

Link building is the process of creating links on other web sites that point to your site, since Google says this is their top criteria for deciding how high to rank your site for any given keywords.

The best way to build links, that we have discovered to date, are:

1. Writing articles and submitting them to hundreds of article directories
2. Writing press releases and submitting them to online PR sites
3. Having several blogs and posting both the articles and press releases from above to the blogs, and including text links to pages in our main web site in the articles and releases

SEO (keyword research and inserting the keywords into your web site) is a one time process, while link building is an ongoing process that is done each month and should be continued for 6-12 months or more.

Good luck with your online growth strategies.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Promoting Your Blog

by John Eberhard

One of the axioms of website marketing is that you can have a great web site or blog and great content but if nobody knows about it, it won’t do you any good.

With a blog, the ideal frequency for writing and posting something is once a week or more often. But with blogs, you can be writing great blog posts once a week and if you don’t let anybody know about them, you will get little to no benefit from it. Basically nobody will come and see your blog posts.

Luckily, with blogs, there is a free mechanism that allows you to promote your blog post broadly. And this mechanism does work and does drive volume traffic to your blog when used properly.

First of all, there are about 30 search engines that are specifically geared towards blogs and their content. The largest of these is www.technorati.com. And there is a way to send out a notification, called a “ping,” to all those search engines after each of your blog posts.

Once the blog search engines receive the ping, they will send an automated “spider” to your blog and index, or include, your new blog posts into their engines. Then, when someone goes to one of the blog search engines and enters a search phrase that fits with the content of your blog post, your blog post will come up in the listings. Thus you can see that it pays to do keyword research and know what search phrases people are commonly using, and to include those phrases in your blog posts. That way more people will see your blog posts.

If you have a Wordpress blog, or if you have a free blog on Wordpress.com or Blog.com, you can configure your blog so that it sends out pings to the blog search engines automatically every time you post something.

Other blogs such as Typepad, or other free blogging sites like Blogger, Posterous, or LiveJournal, do NOT send pings automatically, broadly. But you can use a great free service called www.pingomatic.com which allows you to send out pings to all the blog search engines and takes about a minute.

I have been doing blogging for about two years, putting new articles up on the blog religiously, once a week. About a year ago I started accounts on all the free blogging services: Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com and Blog.com, and I use Posterous.com to send out my blog posts automatically to all my blogs. I post it once on Posterous.com and it goes out to all the blogs.

Once I post any new content to my blog, I go to www.pingomatic.com and send out pings to all the blog search engines for all the blogs that do not do automatic pinging.

My main blog (www.realwebmarketingblog.com) and all my free blogs have links to my main web site (www.realwebmarketing.net), and this system drives more traffic to my main web site month in and month out than any other source, including Google, Yahoo or MSN.

So writing regular content, once a week, and pinging the blog search engines does work and does drive volume traffic to your blog. And that way more people see your blog posts, and a certain percentage of them will then decide to pay you money and buy whatever product or service you are selling. Not a bad deal.

 

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Using Facebook to Promote a Business

by John Eberhard

Facebook is a great medium to promote your business and get more people hiring you for whatever you do. I think it is equally workable for small businesses and for big ones too.

The first thing to do once you have a Facebook account, is to get lots of Facebook “friends.” You do this by finding people that you want to be your friend on Facebook and proposing to them to be Facebook friends. I currently have 3861 Facebook friends. The max they will allow you is 5,000.

The way I built up this fairly large list was to work it a little bit each day. Initially I found people I knew and proposed being Facebook friends to them. Then I started connecting to people who had 20 or more mutual friends. Now that I have a fairly large friends list I am a little more selective now, proposing being friends to people who have 30 or more mutual friends.

What to Communicate on Facebook

Facebook allows you to post what is called a status update as often as you like, and this will then go out to all your Facebook friends. It will appear to them in their feed of items from their friends. You can post just text, or you can upload photos, a video, or post a link to some other page on the web.

I have found it to be very effective to post text 1-3 times a day, saying what I am working on with my business. For example, for me, being a web designer and Internet marketer, I post things like:

• I am designing a new web site for a landscape designer
• Working on a search engine optimization project for a new client
• Just closed a new client for pay per click advertising setup and management
• Working on social media marketing for a client
• Reviewing my pay per click advertising client accounts

This method is extremely effective in letting people know what I do, and putting it out there that I am the guy who does Internet marketing services. It keeps establishing in people’s minds that that is who I am. Plus it shows people that I am busy and getting a lot of work. I recently saw some people at an event, that I had not seen in a while, and the lady said “I see you’re pretty busy.” I inquired as to what had given her that impression, and she said Facebook.

It is also important to post status updates occasionally about your personal life, like your weekend trip, or that your kids are coming over for Thanksgiving, or commenting on how your favorite sports team is doing, or posting a link to some video you like. I have been known to post a link to an article on politics once in a while, as that is an area of strong interest for me.

Here is what you do NOT want to do. You do not want to post status updates all the time that say “Buy my stuff,” “Come to my webinar,” “Buy my book,” “Attend my seminar,” “Buy my CD.” It is OK to do this once in a while. But if you do it all the time and every communication you send out to Facebook is pitching something for your business, it sort of offends the agreement of what Facebook is for, and people will either un-friend you, or block your updates. Or at least be annoyed. Surprisingly I do see some people do this, supposed gurus who should know better.

I find it much more workable to simply post updates on what I am doing. It puts out there what I do and what I am doing, in a way that people do not find offensive. I have followed this same technique with my client social media marketing accounts and it has worked well for them as well.

Following these techniques you will find that you can get new business from Facebook.

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A Three-Pronged Approach to Link Building

by John Eberhard

Link building is a vital part of getting your site to rank well with search engines. Google says that the number of links on other sites pointing to your site is the primary criteria for their determining how high they will rank your site for any given keyword.

Internet marketers used to do something called “reciprocal link building,” where they would contact other webmasters for other sites and offer to put up a link to that webmaster’s site if he would link to them on his site. I believe it has been two years since Google totally devalued these types of links, making them of no value any more. But I still get emails from other webmasters asking to do reciprocal linking. And incredibly I still see articles where the author promotes doing it. Get with it guys!

I have found that three actions are the most successful ones for developing links to a web site today.

Article Directories

For some odd reason in the SEO community, many of the writers look down their noses at article directories, don’t use them or even talk about them. I once posted something on a forum on a major SEO site about article directories and the moderator removed it!

So I don’t know what these SEO types have against article directories, but I have been taking articles about my clients (and my own company) and posting them on article directories, for about four years, and have built up thousands and thousands of links for clients. My own site as of today has 34,300 links to it. I have taken client web sites with practically no links and built them up to thousands in just a few months.

The article should be 400 words (some sites have a minimum), and should be written about some topic of interest in your industry, but should not directly pitch your company. Then you create a “Bio box” which contains a short blurb about the author, his company web site address (actually you can have up to three web addresses) and can contain a phone number.

We have software which partially automates the article submission process, and we will submit to usually 50 to 100 sites per month for our clients. Some of the top article directories includes http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.isnare.com/ and http://www.dime-co.com/.

Online PR

I write press releases about the client company and something they are doing, then submit them to several online PR sites that contain lots of press releases. I have selected PR sites that, if they accept your press release, it will automatically also go onto Google News.

Getting these press releases onto the PR sites creates high quality links. When you check your links for your web site, these PR sites will come up high, on the first couple pages. Some of the online PR sites include www.pr.com, www.24-7pressrelease.com, and www.prlog.org.

So posting articles on article directories creates high volume links, and press releases on the online PR sites creates high quality links.

Blogging

Another great way to create links to your main web site is to write blog articles, post them to your blog, and link certain words in your article back to pages on your main web site. I think this has the most value if your blog has a different address from your main web site.

You should write your article so that it contains keywords that you are trying to rank well for, and then link up to three of those keywords back to appropriate pages on your main web site. Most blogs today are made using either Wordpress or Typepad.

I go one step further on blogging, which is to set up blogs on all the free blogging sites; www.wordpress.com, www.blogger.com, www.posterous.com, www.livejournal.com, and www.blog.com. I used to use www.tumblr.com, but they recently contacted me and told me it is against their policy to allow blog posts with links in them (!?!), so I no longer use them.

I then put my blog article on all these free blogs too, with links pointing back to my main web site or client web site. So if the client has a Wordpress blog, and then I have set up five free blogs for him, that is six blogs. So one article, with three links in it to his main site, will, by this action, create 18 links.

I also use a feature on www.Posterous.com where you can hook up all your blogs to it. Then you send out your article on Posterous and it automatically goes out to all your blogs.

So if I am doing an article and press release for a client each month, I will submit the article to the article directories and the press release to the online PR sites, but I will also post both the article and press release to the client’s blogs.

Summary

I have found, over several years and with much trial and error, that a three-pronged approach to link building, as described above, is the most effective, gets tons of links, and moves a web site up in the search engine rankings.

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Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google is definitely the place to be found online, with 72.11% of all Internet searches, compared to 14.57% for second place Yahoo. And page one is also the place to be, since 83% of all search engine searchers do not go past page one.

But getting onto page one for Google for your top keywords isn’t always easy. Getting onto page one for the regular or organic listings, via search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, can take 6 months or more. And for a really competitive keyword, you may not get onto page one at all.

You can get onto page one via paid ads with Google AdWords, which is great. But it’s also a continuing expense.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the right of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

This new feature is great for local businesses like restaurants, home improvement companies, health care practices, dance studios, attorneys, private schools, or any business that services a local area. When you consider that 66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses, and 73% of all Internet activity is related to local content, if you have a local business, you need to get onto Google Maps.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once a searcher clicks on “more info” on the map, they will be taken to your Google Maps page, which includes, as mentioned before, customer reviews. As I covered in an article a few weeks ago, with customer reviews, as Don Henley says “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” depending on what kind of reviews you get. A couple bad reviews can have a way of killing online business, and somehow they have a way of going to the top of the review listings and staying there a long time.

My recommendation for local businesses is:

1. Get your company listed on Google Maps. We can do this for you if desired.
2. Put up an autoresponder email system like I described in my article a few weeks ago, whereby you enter the email addresses of happy customers into it, and then the system sends them several emails over the course of a week or two asking them to write an online review for you. The emails also include links to several places where they can write reviews. This allows you to be proactive in getting good reviews that will soon outnumber any bad ones.

Using this system you will get onto page one of Google and hopefully will get you good online reviews that will outnumber the bad ones. I am relatively new on this whole line so I don’t know what the numbers are like, but getting onto page one of Google is always a good thing.

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The Full Social: How to Put the Pedal to the Metal with Social Media Marketing

by John Eberhard

Most people these days are familiar with Facebook and Twitter, and maybe MySpace and LinkedIn. And certainly Facebook and Twitter are the two 800 pound gorillas in the room with social media marketing.

But what if you’re not content with just using one or two sites for social media marketing? What if you want to really put the pedal to the metal? Go the distance? Be a world class social media marketer?

The Full Social

As a nod to “The Full Monty” movie I am outlining the Full Social, which is a program of all or nearly all of the social media marketing actions one can take.

First Tier Sites

The first tier social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. The importance of these sites is roughly in that order. The goal is to start accounts, get lots of friends or followers, then put out regular updates on what you are doing with your business. The idea is that by putting out regular updates on what you are doing, you keep yourself high in people’s awareness as the provide of ____ (your product or service). You should also post things occasionally about your personal life, and comment on other people’s posts, so as to develop and maintain engagement. I recommend that people start an account on Ping.fm and hook up all your accounts to it. Then you can post your status updates from Ping.fm and they go out to all the sites at once.

Creating a Facebook fan page gets you a really high quality link to your site or sites, but so many people are doing these now that it is getting harder to get lots of fans.

Second Tier Sites

The second tier social media sites include Plaxo, Plurk, FriendFeed, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and PerfSpot. Same handling as above.

YouTube

Some people consider YouTube a first tier site but it is sort of in its own category because of the way it is used. The idea is to create some videos that promote your business and then get them up on YouTube. Be sure to include your web address and some of your top keywords in the description box. Creating videos these days is not that expensive, using a Flip camera and software such as Camtasia. But it is definitely time consuming.

Squidoo And HubPages

Squidoo.com and HubPages.com are similar in that you can start an account and put up pages on any given topic. You can add pictures, videos, links to your blog and so on, to your pages. For a while these two sites were devalued by Google for some reason but that is over now. The pages you create give you very high quality links and both sites get a lot of traffic. Squidoo is much more friendly to marketing than HubPages, which only allows you to put one link per page.

Business Directories

There are a variety of social media business directories online today, where you can create a listing for your business that includes your contact info, a company description, and links to all your web sites. Some of the sites include HotFrog.com, AboutUs.org, and Mashable.com. One of the advantages of putting up listings on these sites, aside from people seeing your listing and contacting you, is that these listings create very high quality links back to your web site.

Blogging

Blogging is really its own activity but some people consider that it falls under social media. I recommend creating a main blog, using either Wordpress or Typepad, then post something to it weekly. I also recommend starting blog accounts on the free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blog.com. Then using your Posterous.com account, you can hook up all your other blogs to it (including your main blog) and posting on Posterous.com will then send your content out to all your blogs at once. Be sure to include 1-3 links in your post back to your main web site. Some people, when I mention this setup, voice concern over “duplicative content penalties.” However, Google states there is no such penalty so this is apparently a stubborn urban legend. Make sure to send out a “ping” or notification to all the blog search engines after each post, using Pingomatic.com.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is a way for people to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Top bookmarking sites include Delicious.com, Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and Reddit.com. Aside from being a sort of online listing of your favorite web pages, each counts as a link. So you can create bookmarks of all your web sites, individual pages within the sites, and of your blogs.

Summary

Pursuing a full program of social media marketing will get your company out there broadly across the Internet, create a lot of links to your site, put your regular communications in front of a lot of people, and drive in business.

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No Longer Recommend Tumblr.com

Over the past few years I have developed a link building method for myself and for clients, whereby I set up blogs for the client on 6 free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Posterous.com, Blog.com and Tumblr.com.

The purpose of doing this is more distribution for the client's content, but the main purpose is to develop more links to the client's main site.

But recently I was contacted by Tumblr.com and told that they had disabled my blog there for my business RealWebMarketing.net, because I was including links in my post. After email clarification going back and forth I verified that that is what they meant and that their reason was they objected to my including links in my blog posts.

I think this is idiotic, similar to the objection that HubPages.com has to people including multiple links in their articles posted on their web site (you can't have more than one link). Being a marketing person for 21 years, I have never understood the strange "anti-marketing" bias that is exhibited by some techie types.

I can no longer recommend Tumblr.com and predict their eventual demise.

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Google AdWords Quality Score

by John Eberhard

Google AdWords has a sort of measuring stick they use called “quality score.” The quality score is applied to your campaign, and to your ad group within a campaign, and to your individual keywords within the campaign.

Your quality score is important because the better your quality score, the less you will pay for whenever someone clicks on one of your ads. And conversely, with a low quality score your cost per click goes up significantly.

Here’s what Google says about the quality score:

“The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

So we can see that your quality score is important because it affects how much you will pay for each click. This is vital because, especially with the amount of companies using Google AdWords today and competing for your keywords, if you’re not careful your costs can get out of hand and your campaign will not be viable. And when I say not viable I mean that you can end up paying too much for each lead or sale that you get.

“In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.”

“Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody -- advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too -- when the ads we display match our users' needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.”

It’s a little bit of work to sort through what they are saying and what you actually have to do in order to improve your quality score. So here it is simplified.

1. Relevancy: Your keyword, your text ad, and the content you have on your landing page have to all be the same topic. If for instance you have a set of keywords that are all very similar, and your text ad is about that same topic, and then the content of your landing page is all about that same topic, that’s good. You will get a good quality score. This also means that you should eliminate from your ad group any keywords that are only slightly related to what is on your landing page, as including them will lower your quality score.

1. Clickthrough Rates (CTR): In general, the higher your overall clickthrough rate is for a given ad group or campaign, the higher the ad group’s or campaign’s quality score will be.

There are several important implications for this. One is that between the search network and content network (which Google is now calling the “display network”) the search network always gets higher clickthrough rates, by far, than the display network. So it is best to set up one campaign that only goes to the search network, and another that goes only to the display network. That way, the quality score of your search network campaign will be much higher than if you just had both networks together in one campaign.

Another implication is that you should remove keywords from your campaign that have really low clickthrough rates, because including those in the campaign will lower its quality score. I called Google recently and found out from them that if you have a keyword which is getting impressions but has NO clickthroughs, that will not affect your quality score adversely. But as soon as that keyword gets one clickthrough, if the percentage is low, now it will affect your quality score adversely.

1. Search and Display Network: I recently read a book called the “AdWords Manifesto,” where the author said that for your search campaign, you should choose tightly focused keywords that are only on one topic, so that it has good relevancy. Then for your display network campaign, you can throw in related keywords and make it more broad. I actually called Google about some of the things in this book to ask if they were true. The Google rep said that this is not true, and the opposite is true, i.e. you can have a broader selection of keywords on the search network and a more focused group on the display network.

1. Landing Page is Not the Home Page: Many people put up a Google AdWords campaign and have their text ad set up so that when someone clicks on it, the visitor goes to the home page of the advertiser’s web site. This is not ideal and can hurt your quality score, because chances are your home page does not specifically talk about the specific product or service you are advertising in detail. This is especially true if your company has multiple products or services. So if the visitor lands on your home page and it doesn’t even mention the product being advertised, or just briefly mentions it, that hurts your quality score. Better to create a customized page for your Google visitor to land on.

1. Keywords in Text Ad: Including your keywords from your campaign in your text ad improves your quality score.

1. Keywords in Headlines: If you include your keywords from your campaign in the H1 and H2 tags, which are used to define your headlines in an HTML page, that helps your quality score.

Good luck with your Google AdWords campaigns.

 

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Online Reviews

by John Eberhard

Online reviews are becoming an important aspect to a company’s online presence, especially with local service oriented businesses such as home improvement, health care, photographers, or restaurants.

This article is going to be in two parts. In the first I want to caution people that writing a negative review on a company can have a very negative impact on their business. In the second part, I will outline how you can take control of the online review universe.

Cautionary Tales

I believe that in this day and age, with all the communications that go on between people online, from email to Facebook to commenting on blogs and articles to writing reviews, the Internet has somehow cheapened the quality of discourse. Perhaps because online you don’t have to come face to face with the person, people seem more willing to throw manners and civility out the window and viciously savage others when writing to or about someone online.

In the past few weeks I have seen several instances where a company had one or more negative reviews written on them that were having a major effect on their business.

1. A wedding photographer got a couple negative reviews online, which has virtually crashed the business he gets from the Internet.
2. A veterinarian got one very negative review from a client on Yelp. The vet felt the review was unfair and mostly untrue, and appealed successfully to get it removed from Yelp. But even though the review is gone from Yelp where it originally appeared, it still shows up on Google who pulled it from Yelp.
3. A plumbing company got two bad reviews viciously savaging one of their salesmen by name, that the company believes were put up by competitors.

So I want to make an appeal to you right now, that if you have a bad experience with some company, before you write a vicious review on the company online, contact the company and give them a chance to make it right first. Especially if the company gets a lot of their business online, your bad review can seriously damage their business. You may be angry now, but bear in mind that most businesses are really trying to do their best and service the public well. Even the best companies can blow it sometimes, but if you give them a chance they will often try to do something to make it right with you.

Taking Control

OK, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to offer a method whereby you can take control of your online reviews.

If you get a bad review on your company on some online review site, first contact the person and see if there is anything you can do to make it right with that customer, and then afterwards, ask them to amend their online review. If the review is just untrue or really unfair, you can contact the web site where it appears and ask them to take it down. Sometimes they will.

But the method I recommend to really take control is to flood the Internet with positive reviews of your company. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open up an account on one of the online email services. I recommend Aweber or Mailchimp.
2. Set up a list which we will call your “online review list.”
3. Set up a private form page on your web site that is not linked to from your other pages, that has a form to dump emails into this new online review list. Bookmark this page so you can find it easily.
4. Set up a series of 3 autoresponder emails that will go out to the people that you enter on this list. The emails should each say “Thank you for using our company. We want to ask you to write a review on our company on one of the online review sites.” Then include links in the email to the online review sites (Google, Yelp, Insider Pages, Angies List, etc.). Also it is effective to offer some sort of incentive for the person to write a review, such as a $5 Starbucks card or something like that. Set it up so that the first email goes out right away, the 2nd goes out maybe a week later, then the 3rd goes out a week after that.
5. Go to your private form page and enter the emails of new customers you completed work for this week that were very happy with the service. Continue entering those happy customers onto the list every week.

In this way you will be sending out a series of emails to remind your happy customers to write a review on you, and giving them the links right there in the email to go to the review sites. This will make you proactive, put you in better control and significantly increase the number of positive reviews you get. Even if you get a few negative reviews, the positive ones will drown them out.

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Time to Get Your Marketing in Gear

by John Eberhard

Labor Day is now past, marking the official end of the summer season (even though we will still have some hot weather in Los Angeles and in some other parts of the country).

I have observed in past years that many business owners put their attention on other things over the summer – like vacations, fun, etc. Then right after Labor Day, their attention will sort of snap back to their business, and to marketing (including website marketing) and driving in new customers.

This is a good and necessary thing. Not that I’m opposed to vacations and having fun, just having got back from a few days at Big Bear Lake with my family. But as the old song says, there is a season for everything. And now that we’re in September, we are now in the season for getting back to business, school starting and so on.

I would say that this year, it is even more important than usual to get your marketing in gear and ramp up the promotion of your business. The so-called “summer of recovery” never really happened, and economic figures and indicators are not strong.

It is easy to get into the mindset of saying “Unemployment is at almost 10%. Nobody has any money to buy what I am selling.”

I believe that it is entirely possible to promote and drive in new business during the current economic climate. I think it is definitely harder if you sell a high priced luxury item. But if you sell a product or service that people definitely need, you can do it. You may have to change your approach, such as offering a discount or offering some free item along with the sale (an item that is inexpensive in relation to the cost of the sale). Changing your offer is probably a very good thing to do at the present time, especially if responses have been downtrending for a while.

I have stated in the past and I will say it again that it is even more important to continue promoting your business during an economic downturn than it is during good times. There are two reasons for this. One is that when sales or income are down, you should promote to get them back up again. The other reason is that if you continue promoting during lean times, and your competition cuts back, you will take marketshare away from them. And when the recovery arrives, you will be stronger than ever and your competition will be weaker.

And here is a third reason. You can respond to the economic climate by agreeing with it or disagreeing with it. Agreeing with the economy puts you in a frame of mind where you are at effect of whatever happens. Disagreeing puts you in a frame of mind where you can be cause, you can do something about it.

This is not to say that you sit there with your head in the sand and say “There is no recession. Don’t want to hear it. Everything’s fine. Just want to hear good news.” That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is that you should disagree with the recession, by deciding that you are going to find a way to promote your business that will work well during the current climate, and thereby get in new business and flourish despite the economy. This may mean trying a new offer, a new message, a new promotional medium, or even promoting to a new public. And by all means it is time to get your marketing in gear, and don’t stop promoting.

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RealWebMarketing.net Launches Website Marketing Campaign for California DanceArts

Campaign to Include Pay Per Click Advertising, Article Directories, Optimized Press Releases & Search Engine Optimization

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 California DanceArts (http://www.CalDanceArts.com), a dance studio located in La Canada.

The campaign for California DanceArts will include pay per click advertising, article marketing with article directories, online PR with optimized press releases, and search engine optimization.

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net stated, “California DanceArts wanted to start really utilizing the Internet and getting new customers online. So we have developed a campaign using pay per click advertising, and another campaign building up links to their site, utilizing article marketing, and online PR. I believe that in this economic environment, it is more important than ever to keep promoting and increase, not cut back on your promotional efforts.”

Erin Holt of California DanceArts stated “Our goal is to provide quality dance instruction to the local community and through our dance performances several times a year, to elevate the arts and interest in the arts in the community as a whole. We feel that marketing our studio through the Internet is a natural method since the Internet is booming despite the down economy.”

Since 1987, California DanceArts has been dedicated to the purpose of grooming and nurturing the talents of beginning to serious career dance students. The school has established a reputation as a career preparatory studio for dancers transitioning to the professional level. Currently located in beautiful La Canada, California, the school provides three large studio spaces featuring sprung floors designed to prevent injury, 20-foot high ceilings geared for unobstructed jumping, wall mirrors and air conditioning. Director Erin Holt also runs California Contemporary Ballet, a dance company that puts on several original ballet productions per year, including the Snow Queen (www.snowqueenballet.com), an original ballet with an original music score. This show is put on every December and is going into its 13^th season. The school’s blog can be seen at http://caldancearts.typepad.com. For more information about California DanceArts and the programs offered by the school, call 818-790-7924, or visit the school online at www.caldancearts.com.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 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 dance instruction, ticket brokerage, direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, 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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Content Management Systems

by John Eberhard

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system that allows you to log in online, and through an online interface, make changes to your web site. Using a Content Management System you can add pages, make text changes or add pictures to existing pages, change your navigation structure, or make other changes as needed.

Having a CMS is becoming more desirable for web site owners, so they don’t have to learn to use a web development tool like Dreamweaver, and also so they don’t have to depend on a web designer every time they want to make a minor change to the site, such as updating dates or other information.

I’ll admit that earlier on I pooh-poohed Content Management Systems, as some of the early ones I had contact with were difficult to use and very limiting in terms of what you could do. But the field has evolved and the solutions out there today have gotten much better.

There are three CMS’s that are considered the top ones: Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress. Each system is good and very usable and which one you choose depends on which one you are familiar with.

I started designing blogs using Wordpress, which is considered the gold standard for blogging systems. Then I started seeing more and more sites being designed using Wordpress as a CMS. This allows the web site owner to log in and make any changes to their site using the Wordpress interface. So in cases where a client wants a CMS, I am now building sites using Wordpress.

Wordpress has a number of advantages. First of all, anyone who has done any blogging using a Wordpress system is already familiar with how to make changes using the Wordpress interface.

Secondly, Wordpress has a large number of special features called “plugins,” that add different functionality to your web site. Here is a short list of some of the types of plugins you can choose for a Wordpress site:

1. Photo galleries and slideshows
2. A plugin to make search engine optimization easy
3. Put up a poll on your site
4. Music players
5. Video players
6. Web statistics
7. Interaction with social media sites
8. A special plugin called “Buddypress” which makes your site into a social networking site like Facebook
9. And many more

We can deliver a site to a client using any one of the above CMS’s, but I recommend Wordpress for overall ease of use.

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Reaching Out to Local People with Social Media

by John Eberhard

One of the liabilities of many website marketing activities is that they are national or international in scope. This is great if you are selling, or can sell, your products or services internationally. But not so great if you are a local business servicing only a certain metro area or a smaller section of a metro area.

Pay per click advertising is great for hitting a specific local area. But SEO actions, link building, press releases, and blogging will all tend to draw people from all over.

Social media can be used effectively to target a specific geographical area. The biggest social media sites right now are Facebook and Twitter.

With Twitter, you can follow a strategy to build up a bunch of followers in one geographical area. I use a program called Tweet Adder to add followers. It gives you the option to follow people in a certain city or within a certain number of miles from a certain city. You can keep doing that, and a certain percentage of them will follow you back. By doing this you can build up a large number of followers, all in your local area.

With Facebook it is a little more tricky. I have long followed a strategy of proposing to be Facebook friends with people who have 20 or more friends in common. Recently I switched this to 25 or more friends in common.

So if you are a local business, start out by befriending actual friends of yours in your local city. Then you will need to look at their friend lists and go to the person’s profile and see if they live in your city. If so, and if they have a certain number of friends in common, propose being a Facebook friend. It’s an added step (seeing if they live in your city), but by doing this and being fairly aggressive with it, you can build up a large local Facebook friends list.

What to Post

So after you have a large local friends/followers list on Facebook and Twitter, then what? What do you communicate to those people?

Well Twitter allows you up to 140 characters in your “status updates.” Facebook allows 420 characters. So you have to write something short and to the point. Facebook also allows you to post photos and videos.

A strategy that I have found very workable is to start posting one or more posts per day, saying what I am doing with my website marketing business. Like “I am designing a new web site for veterinarian,” or “I just closed a new account for search engine optimization,” or “I am doing weekly pay per click advertising reports for clients.”

This may sound trite or dumb or boring. And maybe it is. But it is amazing that this does create an awareness out there of who I am and what I do. I have seen friends at social functions who have commented that I must be doing really well with my business because they see all this stuff I am posting on Facebook. That is exactly the impression I am working to create – and it’s true to boot. And I get regular reaches and closed business from social media.

This strategy will work equally well for a local dance studio, a photographer, a wedding band, or a home improvement company. Social media can help you reach your local market.

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