Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2012

by John Eberhard

Now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions on how to improve your Internet marketing for 2012. Here are my suggestions for you.

Google Maps: I resolve to take steps to get a Google Maps/Places listing online for my business and work to get that listing onto the first page of results by getting lots of positive online reviews about my business and putting up lots of listings about my business, all of which pushes my Google listing towards page one.

Web Site: I resolve to make sure my web site gets fully re-designed in 2012 if it has not been re-designed since the Civil War, and to update the content of the site regularly so it is current and fresh. (I hear my web designer can convert my site into Wordpress so I can make revisions to the site myself.)

Identity Capture: I resolve to offer items on my site such as free email newsletter subscriptions, and free reports and eBooks, to capture the identities and email addresses of people visiting my site. I know that this is one of the best ways to grow my email list.

Video: I resolve to get a video made for my business in 2012 if I don’t yet have one, or to create more video content in 2012 if I already have some, knowing that online video marketing is one of the best ways to present my business and sell it.

Posting to the Blog: I resolve to post new content to my blog at least once a week in 2012, realizing that search engines give more weight or importance to blogs specifically because they usually have fresh content added regularly. I realize that a blog post can be just a comment and link to some other content on the web, or posting a video of interest from YouTube. I realize that putting up a blog, but not posting anything to it in 2011 (you know who you are) doesn’t help my online efforts.

Web Statistics: I resolve to ensure my site has some sort of good web statistics program such as Google Analytics, and to regularly check the stats so I know how many people are coming to the site, what pages they are visiting, what sites are referring me traffic, and what keywords people are typing in on search engines to find me. I know that most free web stats programs that come with a hosting plan are total crap, and that Google Analytics is free and very good.

SEO and Keyword Research: I resolve to get search engine optimization done for my web site is 2012 if it has not been done in the last two years, knowing that the Google Panda update makes this even more important than before. I know that I should be targeting keywords that have high traffic, but a low number of competing sites. I know that with a local business I should be targeting local oriented keywords.  

Email Newsletter: I resolve to create an email newsletter if I don’t have one already, and to ensure I get a new one out at least once a month. I resolve to offer the newsletter subscription on my site and build my email list.

Link Building: I resolve to greatly increase the number of links to my site from other sites, knowing that Google says that the number of links is the most important criteria they use to determine how high my site will rank for my targeted keywords.

Social Media: I resolve to use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more often in 2012 to market my business. But I know that I also have to be engaged with my friends and followers, respond to their posts, and to sometimes post things about my personal life, not just hammer people with “buy my products” type messages. I resolve to significantly increase my number of friends and followers on social media sites in 2012.

Leads/Sales: I resolve to get my web site really producing leads and/or sales in 2012, so that the site is a real contributing force towards the success of my business and not just a source of frustration and embarrassment.

Google: I resolve not to give Google god-like status like some people do. They’re just a business for cryin out loud. I resolve not to freak out about the Panda update but to make appropriate changes in my actions at the appropriate time.

RealWebMarketing.net Fun Game: I resolve to respond to the little jokes in the RealWeb Newsletter, and build up points so I can win a Real Web Marketing T-shirt and be the envy of all my friends.

Consultant: I resolve to respect and take the sagely advice of my marketing consultant, and to pay him on time.

I wish you the best in keeping your New Year’s resolutions, and I feel confident that 2012 will be the best year ever for all of us.

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Wordpress.com Shuts Down Sites

by John Eberhard

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Wordpress.com has started doing something that I consider idiotic. They are taking down any blog on their system if they discover you have been (gasp!) linking to commercial web sites in your blog posts. Another example of the misguided "anti marketing" attitudes you see around in various places on the Internet and in the IT world.

They have taken down my blog on there and several that we made for clients. So I am going around them. I am creating sub-folders on one of my domains and creating Wordpress blogs for clients there.

I remember running into this "anti Marketing" attitude when I worked at Executive Software and at Panda Software. I wonder if those people would have pause to consider where their paychecks come from and the fact that marketing to a large extent makes it possible for commerce to take place and for them to earn a living.

Here is exactly what they said in response to an email:

“You agreed to the WordPress.com Terms of Service when you signed up.

”WordPress.com does not allow blogs that are created for the purpose of directing traffic or creating backlinks to commercial web sites, affiliate/ptc programs or multi-level marketing campaigns. Your site has been suspended and will not be returned to you.”

It's amazing how many of these sites are like this. HubPages.com has a very similar anti marketing policy. You can have one link on each page you make and not any more.

My plan is to not use Wordpress.com any more.

 

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Internet Marketing in 2012

by John Eberhard

At this time of year, going back for several years, I usually do an article about what we can expect from Internet marketing in the coming 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. 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: Social media will continue to be an important avenue in online marketing, with Facebook being the big player, then YouTube, then Twitter, then LinkedIn. I think social media is a great vehicle for marketing small businesses with limited budgets and for low cost items. A little over a year ago Facebook made changes allowing you to customize the look of your fan pages, with one screen that visitors would see before they “liked” you and a different one afterwards. MySpace really crashed in the last year in terms of usage, and was sold for peanuts, after having been the biggest thing in social media just a few years ago. With Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the key is to get lots of friends/followers/connections, so that whatever communications you send out get seen by lots of people. Google+ is Google’s entry into the social media universe (similar to Facebook), and will start to become more popular in the coming year.

c. SEO: Search Engine Optimization has always been a vital part of website marketing and that will not change in the coming year. The term refers to doing research to find the best keywords to use, then inputting those keywords into specific places on your website, then building up links to your site from other sites around the web.

The major techniques Real Web Marketing Inc. has used for link building for the past few years have been:

1. Submitting articles to article directories
2. Writing press releases and submitting these to online PR sites
3. Creating multiple blogs and posting articles and releases to these, including links back to the client’s main site

Google came out with a new algorithm update in February 2011 called “Panda,” and has come out with minor updates every couple of weeks since then. The major purpose of the update appears to be to stop people from building up links to their sites via article directories. We are still doing link building using the techniques listed above, and I am closely watching the statistics for these clients to see if Panda is defeating our efforts. The above program is still working fine as measured by statistics. But we can probably figure that sometime in the next year, the effectiveness of article marketing will diminish, and we will have to come up with another method of developing links.

d. Local SEO: I should explain that there are two significantly different approaches to SEO. It depends on whether your company is local, i.e. only delivering products or services to a specific geographical area, or regional or national. This distinction has become much more important in the last year.

For local companies, it is much more important to go for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that mention the city or cities where the company does business. In other words, a dentist would not try to target or rank for general keywords like “dentist” or “root canals,” because he would be competing with basically every other dentist on the face of the earth. Instead he would target keywords like “dentist Glendale” or “dentist Pasadena,” or “root canal Glendale.” You still have to do keyword research to find keywords that have traffic coming to them, because it doesn’t do any good to target a keyword and rank number one for it when nobody searches for it. If you’re in a major metro area like Los Angeles it is smart to include research on keywords relating to names of suburbs or neighborhoods.

Once you find local oriented keywords that have search traffic, you put those keywords into your site the same way as you do for national SEO. Another technique is to select the largest traffic keywords on your list and register some domain names that contain those keywords in the name. Then put up a micro-site on those domains, i.e. a small site. Make sure you don’t make that site identical to your main site as Google frowns on multiple identical sites.

Once you complete keyword research, input those keywords into your main site, and put up one or more microsites, then you still have to do link building, to get your site ranking for those keywords.

e. Local Marketing: This has been the biggest change in the last year. Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps/Places. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. Both Yahoo and Bing have introduced a similar feature.

The first thing to do is to make sure there is a listing on Google Maps/Places for your business. Google gas created thousands of listings for businesses, but not all of course. So you have to see if you have a listing and if so, claim it. If not put one up.

Then in order to get your listing to appear at or near the top, you have to put up listings (called “citations” in Google parlance) on other local listings sites, and ensure you get online reviews from your customers. So this is an ongoing action and is very important, especially in competitive industries, because getting your Google Maps/Places listing on page one of the results will drive a lot of traffic to you.

f. Email Marketing: The most effective use of email marketing today is to build up a large in-house email list by offering an email newsletter or offering other items such as white papers or special reports, then sending newsletters and other offerings to that list. Many companies neglect this completely and are leaving money on the table. Just make sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

g. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs. They are one of the best things you can do, and it’s free. I have several blogs and for the last several years they have been the biggest source of traffic to my main site. But once you start a blog you have to post to it regularly for it to do any good.

h. Video: Video is a great way to effectively communicate the benefits of your products or services, and posting on YouTube and other video sharing sites can give you lots of exposure.

Best wishes for 2012 and may it be your most prosperous year ever. There is no question that the economy is affecting us all, but with smart and effective marketing we can overcome it and be successful.

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SEO Today

by John Eberhard

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to get your web site to rank well for certain specific keywords on search engines, so that you get more traffic to the site from those search engines.

It used to be that SEO meant taking actions to the site itself to make it more likely to rank for your keywords, which is called “on-page optimization.” It still means that, but now the term has taken on the additional meaning of actions you take to build up links to your site, which is called “off-page optimization.”

Local or National?

The first thing to do when considering embarking on search engine optimization is to determine whether your business is local or national in nature. Do you sell products or services to people only in one local area, or nationally or internationally?

If yours is a local company, then your efforts should be directed towards ranking well on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, as well as doing SEO specifically for local oriented keywords, i.e. keywords that contain the name of the cities or towns where you do business. See my recent articles on local businesses and Google Maps.

National

If you have a national business like mine (I do business with companies all across the U.S.) then you need to do regular SEO. This consists of:

1. Keyword Research: This means to come up with a list of possible keywords and then finding out the amount of traffic they are getting (how many people are searching for them), and the number of sites that are competing for them. You want to find keywords that have a low number of sites competing for them, because if the number is too high, you just won’t be able to compete for those keywords, at least not in the short term. I consider the number of competing sites to be more important than the traffic per keyword, and I sort the keywords and group them by the number of competing sites. Most single word keywords are too competitive.

1. On-Page Optimization: Isn’t that a fancy word? That’s at least a $10 word I think. Anyway, this means to take the keywords that you select, and to put them into the various pages of your site. You have to write titles and descriptions for each individual page of your site, then put those into the meta-tags, or invisible code of your web page. Those titles and descriptions are then what appears on Google or other search engines when your listing comes up. Usually it works best to select 3 primary keywords for each page, that are most relevant to that particular page, then write titles and descriptions using those keywords. You can also put keywords into what are called “alt tags,” which are tags associated with pictures on your page.

1. Link Building: Next it is important to build up links to your web site coming from other web sites. Google has said for years that they consider the number of links to your site to be the most important criteria in determining how well it ranks for any given keyword. I have been engaged in link building in various forms for about 7 years. Here are the most effective forms of link building that I have found:

1.  
   1. Press Releases: Write press releases about your company and then submit these to online PR sites, and post them to your blog or blogs. When you post them to a blog, include text links in the blog post that point to pages on your main site.
   2. Blogs: Post items regularly to your blog or blogs, and include text links linking to various pages on your main web site.
   3. Article Marketing: Write articles about your company topic and post these to article directories.

SEO people used to do what is called reciprocal linking, contacting other web site owners and offering to link to them if they’ll link to you. Google took steps to discount these types of links several year ago, so it is typically not done anymore, though I occasionally see companies still offering this or software being offered that is geared to this.

Panda

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Google’s algorithm update called “Panda,” which began in February, and there have been regular additions to it every couple weeks since then.

It appears that the intention of Panda is to make it so web site owners can’t do anything to improve their search engine rankings, and specifically to target article marketing, where you submit the same article to multiple article directories.

I have been silent on Panda up until now, other than discussing it with colleagues. First of all I will say that I don’t agree with the overall apparent intention to make it so web site owners can’t improve their rankings. I think this objective is something that is good for Google or makes things easier for them, but is bad for web site owners. Thus I will condemn it here in the strongest terms.

Second I’ll discuss whether this affects link building. I think it will affect link building in the coming year. But since I am doing link building for a number of clients using the actions listed above, I have closely monitored the effects, in terms of the only statistics that matter, namely number of links, keyword rankings and web site traffic.

For the clients that I am monitoring, I am seeing no adverse effects due to Panda, in terms of links, rankings and traffic. The above link building program is still working well and getting good results. Will we have to change it eventually? Yes probably. When the statistics indicate it. But in my opinion we have not reached that point yet.

With an overwhelming market share in terms of online searches, I believe Google has too much power. They hate people finding ways to “game” their system as they put it. But from my perspective, if, as a small business owner, you can’t find a way to be proactive or “cause” over your rankings situation, then you just have to sit there as total “effect.” Their philosophy seems to benefit entities that are already well established and known, but small companies that are just now starting to do SEO are just out of luck.

I don’t agree with that, and will continue to find the best ways for companies to be able to improve their rankings and be “cause” over their situations.

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New Video Introducing Real Web Marketing Inc.

Here is a new video I just completed introducing Real Web Marketing Inc.

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The Local Business on the Internet

by John Eberhard

The marketing of a local business, one that just sells products or services within a limited geographical area, such as a restaurant, a health care practice, or a home improvement company, is a special issue and has to be treated differently from a business that can sell its products or services nationally or internationally.

What’s More Important for a Local Business

Google Maps: Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. See below for a screen shot of a search for pizza.

When I first started doing work on Google Maps I thought you could just throw up a listing on Google Maps and you were done. But I soon found out that with some particularly competitive industries, such as dentists for instance, that you had to continue to work it month to month by adding more and more listings on other sites (called “citations” in Google parlance, and Google sees these and it helps push your listing toward the top). Also it is important to work to get more reviews from customers.

But if you get onto the first page of Google results via Google Maps, you will see good traffic from that.

Google AdWords: Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords is very important for the local business, but only for relatively high ticket items, i.e. products or services that sell for say $200 or more. That is because of the large number of businesses that now advertise on Google AdWords, which pushes the bid prices up. So this works very well for say, a home improvement company that sells services starting at $5,000, but not so well for a company that sells something for $50.

But if it is appropriate for your type of business, pay per click is a great way to generate leads or sales, quickly, and on an ongoing basis. And you can select the exact geographical area where your ads will appear, so you don’t waste your money on people outside your service area.

Email Marketing: Marketing to people via email, specifically by creating a growing an “in-house” list of customers and prospects, is vital for the local business. I have observed that renting email lists, which was a huge deal back in the early 2000s, is now pretty much dead, because of the proliferation of spam. But if people are already aware of you, then email newsletters and other reminders about you and your services are vital today.

This means you have to have things on your web site for what we call “capturing identities.” This means to have a “contact us” form, but also to offer things that will appeal to your prospects and especially appeal to people who would be your prospect but are not ready to buy right now. So it is a good idea to offer an email newsletter, as well as free information products such as free reports on topics related to your business. Basically these are things to build up your email list.

Video: Having videos on YouTube and on various places on your site has become more important over the last few years. This is an excellent way to differentiate your company from the pack and show the public what you do. See my recent articles on video marketing (1, 2).

Blogging: Having a blog and posting regular articles to it is an excellent way to drive traffic to a web site, although you can’t be guaranteed that everyone will be a local area resident. The key with blogging is to post things regularly, and to send a notice called a “ping” to blog search engines each time (this is done automatically in Wordpress).

What’s Less Important

SEO for General Keywords: If you are a dentist in Glendale, it is not very important for you to try to rank for the keyword “dentist.” Remember you will be competing with every dentist in the entire world. Similarly if you have a pizza restaurant in Pasadena, you should not try to do actions to rank for “pizza.” You’ll be competing with thousands of other restaurants and with corporate company sites like Pizza Hut and Dominoes.

What IS important for a local business these days is getting your web site to rank for local oriented keywords, like “dentist Glendale” or “pizza Pasadena.”

But I will add a big caution on this. I’ve seen companies similar to mine going around selling local businesses on services to get them to rank for local keywords like this. And the thing is that it will do you NO good whatsoever unless those keywords have some decent traffic coming to them. In other words, you can rank #1 for a keyword, but if no one is searching for it, so what? I have seen cases where someone was sold a package to get them ranking for local keywords and most or all of them had no value. So you have to do some research and see what kind of traffic the keywords have first before embarking on something like that. It depends on what industry you’re in and what location you’re in.

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Real Web Marketing Inc. Offers Live Action Video

Company Offers Shooting of Live Video, Editing, and Uploading to Video Sharing Sites

LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, is now offering live action video shooting and editing services. The company recently completed its first live action video editing project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, a tax consulting company located in northern California that helps people avoid paying sales tax on the purchase of aircraft.

Real Web Marketing’s video project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals involved flying to Medford, Oregon to videotape the company’s seminar presented to aircraft owners. The completed video can be seen here:

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “A while back we started doing video production, but we were limited to simple Powerpoint style slide show videos. Now we have upgraded our systems and software and are offering live action video. A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages. A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video. Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). The obvious conclusion is that adding video to any type of online campaign is important today and will improve results. That’s why we wanted to get into this.”

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 health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website 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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Real Web Marketing Inc. Launches New Site for Marketing for Health Care Practices

Site to Offer Affordable Marketing Programs Including Web Design, Pay Per Click, and Google Maps for Doctors

LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new web site called HealthCareTraffic.com (http://www.healthcaretraffic.com) offering online marketing services specifically for health care practices.

The web site’s initial offering is specifically for dentists, and includes three different Dentist Traffic Programs, with different costs based on the amount of services offered. Each of the three programs includes a search engine optimized and conversion optimized web site and blog, set up on social media sites, pay per click advertising, email marketing, local marketing through Google Maps and other similar sites, call tracking and autoresponder marketing.

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “The economy is making it harder for all health care practices to get new patients. The concept behind this web site and these new marketing programs for dentists is to create a really comprehensive marketing program but bring the costs down and make it affordable for practice owners. Within a few months we will start to release similar programs for other health care professionals.”

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 health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website 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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Video Marketing 102

by John Eberhard

In my last article I talked about video marketing and various statistics that indicate that video marketing is an important tool in marketing your business online today. I also listed out 6 different types of videos that a business could create today to market itself.

Recently I found market share figures from AimClear showing that in Google search results, YouTube results were returned 84% of the time. Not surprising, since Google owns YouTube. Dailymotion.com results were returned 3% of the time and Metacafe.com results were returned 2% of the time. So YouTube is truly the main place to be for your videos.

Getting Your Video to Rank

Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.

This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.

AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. That means that in order for your video to come up in search results for a given keyword, that it has to rank well, or come up high in search results on YouTube or other video sharing sites.

Google typically will show videos in universal search results in what are called “two-pack,” “three-pack,” and “four-pack” formations, where they show 2, 3, or 4 videos in one line going across. According to AimClear, 58% of the videos returned in search results were in the two-pack formation.

Keyword Intent

A recent article on Reelseo.com indicated that the intent of the keywords you use, in the text description that you upload with your video, affects how well your video will rank on the video sharing site.

Transactional Keywords, like “buy,” “cheap,” “free,” or “sale” may appeal to viewers, but they will not help with getting your video to rank well on YouTube or other sharing sites. Only 12% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these transactional type keywords in the descriptions.

Navigational Keywords, containing the website address, brand names, and brand descriptions, did poorly also. Only 18% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these navigational type keywords in the descriptions.

So what did do well?

Informational Keywords, like phrases that are comparative (this versus that), instructional (“how to” or “learn”), and educational (“what is” or “history of”), did very well. 84% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these informational type keywords in the descriptions.

So when giving your video a title when uploading, and in writing your description text and tags, include informational keywords and steer clear of transactional keywords.

And as the article referenced above also states, “Make great videos – this is not from AimClear’s study, but still seems like good advice to me. With universal SERP (search engine results pages) real estate being so valuable, I doubt Google or Bing are going to let it become infected with poor quality video anytime soon.”

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Video Marketing 101

by John Eberhard

Since I started doing live action videos (shooting and editing into final form), I’ve been doing research lately on video marketing. Here are some initial results.

A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages.

A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video.

Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). And I’ll add that we’re talking about a link in the email to a video, as there is no reliable way to have a video actually play in the email itself.

Flimp.com reported that for their email campaigns involving video, the clickthrough rate was 32%.

Videos have 41% higher clickthrough rate than plain text in search results.

So I think we’ve established that adding video to your web site and into your marketing campaigns is a positive thing.

6 Types of Video

This is an excerpt from an article “The 6 ways your company should be using video” by Shana Fulle on Ragan.com.

“FAQ. Creating a frequently asked questions video will allow clients and customers to have easy access to their questions. A great FAQ can be the determining factor whether you are chosen over a competitor.

“Social media. Creating video blogs (vlogs) or including other useful and relevant video to your social media channels will not only enhance your brand image, but will also increase search engine optimization (SEO)—and your chances of being found over a competitor.

”Interviews. Interviewing your C-suite executives (top level execs, CEO, CFO, etc.) on camera is a great way to communicate the company's message. These videos are also perfect for establishing your brand as a thought leader in the industry.

”Video Tour. Online virtual tours have allowed people to see all aspects of an environment without having to be present. In 2010, 108 million Internet users viewed a Web-based tour. Creating a video tour is an inexpensive way to show potentially millions of people what you are offering, like a house or car for example.

”Testimonials. Drive your sales by boosting customer confidence with video testimonials. Posting your testimonial videos via multiple platforms will also increase your visibility and likelihood of appearing in search results. If that's not enough, these videos are also inexpensive and hold a long shelf life.

”Promotional. Along the same lines as a testimonial video, a promotional video can be taken even further. Create an animated video for your brand, an infomercial to showcase products, or develop a concept to promote an upcoming event.”

Video can be in a couple of different formats, including a very simple Powerpoint style slide show video, with narration and music, photos, but no live action video. The pictures can move or zoom, but there is no actual live video in it. Then there is, of course, the live action video, which can have various degrees of complexity.

Getting Your Video to Show Up in Search

Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.

This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.

AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. In my next article I’ll cover how to get your article ranking well on the video sharing sites.

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Marketing in Cleveland

by John Eberhard

This article is going to be a bit different than most of my Internet marketing articles. This one is more about economics.

Back in August I traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up, to spend a few days visiting with my father who was 92 years old and whose health was failing. In the past few days I visited Cleveland again to pay my final respects.

During the first trip in August I drove around my old stomping grounds - where we lived when I was younger on the east side of Cleveland, and then where we lived when I was in junior high and high school on the west side.

I was struck, particularly on the west side, with how economically depressed the area seemed. The houses still seemed well maintained, but many of the businesses were vacant and the area had the feel of a ghost town. It was starkly different from when I grew up there, and starkly different from where I live now in Los Angeles, which seems more active and vibrant economically.

Of course I know that the U.S. and the world really is in a major recession. So businesses are hurting everywhere. But the west side of Cleveland seemed particularly hard hit.

What caused this major shift, with Cleveland being listed as one of the most economically depressed cities in the U.S.? And what do they need to do to come out of it?

The Third Wave

So now I’m going to get all philosophical and intellectual on you (you’ve been warned). A few years ago I read a book called “The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock. In the book Toffler discussed what he characterized as the “third wave,” basically the information age or the computer age, with the first wave having been the agricultural age and the second wave being the industrial age.

One of the aspects of the information age which Toffler described was that different countries entered each of these ages at different times. So countries like the U.S. and the UK and other European countries that had entered the industrial age relatively early on, were now leading the way into the information age. And another aspect of this was that previously undeveloped countries were now entering the industrial age.

What I realized from this was that in the 21st century, there would be a sort of division of labor between countries. Previously second or third world countries, as they entered the industrial age, would now become the centers of heavy industry for the world, handling things like steel production. And early industrial countries like the U.S. would now lead the way with information products, like computers and software and high tech.

Following this line of reasoning, you could look at previously heavy industrial areas like Cleveland and Detroit, and where heavy industry had left, you’d be pretty certain that they weren’t going to come back again.

When I was a kid Cleveland had been a heavy steel and auto production town. Many of my friends’ fathers worked in the steel mills. Now those mills are gone. In fact, there is a big shopping mall there where the big steel mill used to be.

Now we could argue about what caused the steel factories to leave, and maybe it was the unions, and I’ve heard people argue that it is bad that we now get most of our steel from Korea. And we could look at how the unions have affected the big U.S. car companies and how they have all been in or close to bankruptcy.

And I’ve heard people argue that it is bad that we now depend on other countries for certain products, and that we as a country need to be self contained and totally self sufficient and produce everything we need.

While I do agree that the U.S. needs to be more energy self sufficient, I do not feel we are ever going to get the toothpaste back in the tube when it comes to heavy industry leaving the United States. Many of these other countries have lower wage levels and it makes sense business wise to have them do the manual labor, industrial type jobs.

So where does that leave the U.S.? And where does that leave Cleveland? And what do businesses in Cleveland need to do to get back to vibrant condition?

Well what Cleveland needs is the same thing that any other city needs. And what businesses in Cleveland need to do is the same as what businesses everywhere need to do:

1. Accept that we are in a new age, an age where the U.S. is and will be dominated by information or technology oriented products and businesses.
2. Innovate new products and services in the information or technology sector. Become the next Steve Jobs in your particular niche.
3. Work hard and deliver good service.
4. Market your better mouse trap aggressively so the world knows about it and can buy it (you were wondering when I was going to mention the word “marketing,” weren’t you?)

I think if we all do that, Cleveland, and the whole U.S., can get things going again and get back to the financial prosperity and vibrancy that we all desire.

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Becoming a Trusted Information Source

by John Eberhard

“Strategy” refers to a plan of action that one follows in business that affects nearly everything you do, and is usually followed over a long period of time. A marketing strategy is a plan of action for marketing a business that one follows over a long period of time.

A very effective marketing strategy that I have employed with numerous companies over the last 10 years has been to make that company into a trusted information source.

What you do to become a trusted information source is to write lots of material that contains helpful information on the topic of your products or services. Then you give it out to people, usually for free.

The first version of this was the company newsletter, where conventional wisdom said that you were supposed to make it 2/3 helpful information and 1/3 sales oriented copy. The idea was that the helpful information drew in the reader and then he would see your ads or other sales information.

Today one writes articles with helpful information on your topic (not sales pitches) and then put those articles into newsletters, on blogs, on article directory web sites, or in free reports or “white papers.”

Why Use This Strategy?

Many companies are following this strategy today. For those who are not, the question arises as to why you would want to devote time and money to such a strategy, because it is after all a pretty major commitment to follow such a strategy over a long period of time.

The reason you would to follow this strategy is to establish trust with prospects. This is vital to do today, especially over the Internet and especially in situations where the prospect has never heard of you before. The idea is that you are presenting information which the prospect can see is valid and true, and which he finds valuable. From this he concludes that you know what you are talking about regarding the topic at hand, which is the topic of your business and your products or services, and he feels more comfortable buying your products or services.

I have observed that this strategy has emerged in a major way in business over the last 10 years or so, and many businesses are following it. I myself have been following this strategy with my own company, writing an article a week and sending it out in my own newsletter and putting it on blogs, and this has been the most successful element of my own marketing strategy. I have also followed the strategy successfully with quite a few of my clients, either with my company writing the articles or taking the articles the client has written and sending them out.

I think that the strategy works especially well with companies like mine that are in the “information business,” but it also works equally well with companies such as home improvement, health care, skin care, the arts, technology, education, law, apparel, consulting and many others.

If you are not already following the “trusted information source” strategy, I recommend that you talk to a marketing consultant and discuss the merits of this strategy. There are various degrees to which you could get into this strategy too. You don’t have to write an article a week like I and some of my other clients do. You could write an article and put out a newsletter and blog post once a month, or even once a quarter. But especially if you have a blog, after a while of doing this you will build up a substantial body of work, that will do wonders for your credibility with new prospects.

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More on Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google Maps, also called Google Places, has significantly changed the landscape for local oriented searches on Google.

It used to be that you would search for something on Google, and you would get two kinds of results: one was called “organic” results, which appeared in the wider left hand column, and the other was called “sponsored search results,” which meant pay per click advertising with Google AdWords paid ads, which were located in the narrow right hand column and in the first three positions on the left hand side.

Now with Google Maps/Places, when Google figures out that you are doing a search that is local in nature, they will add a map in the upper part of the right hand column, and a series of listings marked with an orange balloon in the left column.

If you search for “pizza restaurant” from the Los Angeles area where I am, you will see this:

Note if you scroll down the page a bit you will see a total of 7 Google Maps listings, and for each it shows a star rating, the number of reviews on Google, the restaurant web address, the street address and phone. If you click on the name of the restaurant it takes you to their web site. If you click on the number of reviews it takes you to the Google Places page.

So the key to remember here is that if you have a local oriented business that serves one local area, and you have a Google Maps/Places listing, you could automatically have your Places listing on page one of the Google results. And getting onto page one of the regular Google organic results is not quite that easy.

So it would seem that all you have to do is put up a Google Maps/Places listing and you would automatically be on page one, right? Well when I started working with Google Maps/Places listings I thought it was basically that easy. I soon learned it isn’t.

The problem is that in some industries it is so competitive that just putting a listing up isn’t enough. You have to do other things to push your listing up to the top. For instance, I learned first hand that dentists and computer repair companies are both so competitive that your listing could potentially not appear until page 10 or later.

I soon learned that it is vital to have:
1. Lots of customer reviews
2. Listings on other similar sites such as Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Hotfrog.com and other sites. Google sees these listings and if you have a lot of them it will push your listing up higher.

You will notice that whatever local oriented search you do, that for the most part the company that is in the number one slot will have lots of reviews, in most cases the most of any of the listings.

So I learned that this is a maintenance program where you have to do things every month to work towards that number one slot and then to maintain it once you get up there.

But once you get to number one the rewards are great.

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Auto Tweets

by John Eberhard

I’ve been using the Tweet Adder software for some time now to add more followers for my own Twitter account and those of a number of my clients. It has an “auto tweet” function that allows you to set up messages that you want to go out to your Twitter followers on an automated basis.

Tweet Adder also allows you to set up an automated email message that goes out to people saying “Hey thanks for following me” when they follow you. I think that’s one of the worst cases of wasted bits and bytes in the history of computing so I’m not talking about that.

The feature I’m talking about allows you to set up automated messages to go out to all your Twitter followers. You can set up as many as you want, and then determine how many of them will go out per day.

I had never used this feature until a friend told me he was doing it and it was causing significant traffic to his web site. So I decided to give it a try, and I’ve been running automated tweets for my own account and five other accounts, for a couple of weeks. And I see after checking Google Analytics that it is starting to generate traffic.

On one of the accounts I’ve got around 40 auto tweets set up, and then it is set so that 20 of them show per day. So that way they cycle through every other day, not the same ones every day. You can also set the time between the messages so I set that at 15 minutes.

The question some people may ask is “Doesn’t that make it look like those messages are automated? Can’t people tell it is a bot doing it?” Well yeah, that’s possible. But I doubt that most people would be on Twitter long enough or frequently enough to notice that. Especially if you keep adding more messages over time so there is less frequent repetition of the messages.

So the next question would be, “What type of messages should I send out?” Always the helpful soul, I have come up with a list of the types of things you should send out.

1. Link to Articles: If you have a blog or information articles on your web site, then just write out the title of the article in quotes, then a link to the article. For the link use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl, because you only get 140 characters on Twitter. If you have lots of articles you have written, do one auto tweet for each.

2. Link to Free Reports or White Papers: If you have any free reports or white papers that you are offering, then say something like “Download my free white paper “Marketing with Social Media” http://goo.gl/Vqx6N”.

3. Links to Your Email Newsletter Signup: If you offer a free email newsletter, promote it via Twitter, with a little blurb explaining what the newsletter is about and a link to the signup page. Remember, only 140 characters.

4. Links to Videos: If you have some videos about your company on YouTube, write a short blurb about the video and include a link to it.

5. Products or Services: Do an auto tweet for each of your products or services. Write a short explanatory blurb about the product or service, then include a link to the page on your web site that is about that.

6. Testimonials: Do an auto tweet linking to your testimonials page.

7. Facebook: Ask your Twitter followers to be your Facebook friend or to like your fan page and include a link to your Facebook profile or fan page.

8. LinkedIn: Ask people to connect to you on LinkedIn.

9. Events: if you’re holding some special event like a seminar or webinar or something like that, do an auto tweet, but make sure to take it out of your list after the event is over.

That’s not meant to be a complete list, but it can definitely get you going. Then let the traffic begin. Good luck with your social media marketing.

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How to Increase Traffic to a Web Site

by John Eberhard

You have a web site, and you have Google Analytics running on the site, so now you know how many visitors you’re getting. And let’s say you find out that it’s not very much traffic. What do you do?

First let’s define how much is not very much traffic. This is relative, and subject to opinion. It also depends on whether the site is a specialized business to business (B2B) site or a more general business to consumer (B2C) site. But we can say without too much risk that if you’re getting less than, say, 300 visitors to your site per month, then that’s not very much.

In my earlier article, “Web Site Conversions,” I covered what to do if you find you have decent amounts of traffic coming to the site, but a low number of people filling out your forms and giving you their name and email.

This is now the other side of the coin. What do you do when you discover you’re just getting very low traffic?

I would say that web site traffic generation falls mainly into these categories:

1. Email marketing
2. Pay per click advertising
3. Social media marketing
4. Blogging
5. SEO and link building

Email Marketing

This can be a very effective way of driving traffic to a web site. The most effective method is to build up your in-house list of prospects and customers, and to mail to it regularly.

I have had some success from purchased lists or from compiling lists myself from various web sites, such as state and local associations of various professions that list the emails of their members. Of course you have to be aware of the laws regarding emailing and follow them fully.

If you use an in-house list or purchased or compiled lists, you can email aggressively and drive traffic inexpensively.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising (PPC) through Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center or Facebook, is very effective in driving traffic to a web site. Of course it costs money, so I usually recommend it for companies that are already a going concern and can afford to put a certain amount of budget towards it. I usually recommend companies to put at least $1,000 per month into the budget.

But PPC advertising is very effective and can be set up and running in a relatively short period of time.

Social Media Marketing

Social media web sites can be used very effectively to drive traffic to your site. The two key actions are 1) build up a large list of friends/followers/connections, and 2) create an effective strategy of communicating regularly to those lists.

I have written at length elsewhere on effective social media strategies so I won’t cover them here. One important thing to know is that social media can be used to market a business, and relatively inexpensively. But it does usually involve a commitment of time, either by you or in paying someone to do it for you.

Blogging

Most people don’t realize that a blog can be used to drive traffic. I run several blogs, and write an article on marketing once a week throughout the year. That blog drives more traffic to my site than any other single source, including Google.

The key is to write something regularly (once a week or more), and ensure that a “ping” is sent to the blog search engines after every single post you make (Wordpress does this automatically). Then make sure you have items in your sidebars that link back to your main web site. The idea is that the search engines drive people to the blog, then links on the blog will send them to your main site.

SEO and Link Building

Search engine optimization (SEO) means to select keywords that have decent traffic but not much competition, then put those keywords into all the areas of your web site where it is acceptable to do so. Link building means to build up links on other web sites linking back to pages on your site. Google says that their main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to it from other sites, so this is important.

SEO and link building, both together, are perhaps the most important action in building consistent traffic to a web site. But the thing is, it takes a definite commitment and a bit of time (6 months to a year or more) to do it. And it takes a budget. We are doing this for several of our clients. But it is not necessarily something I recommend for a small business.

Summary
The primary actions to build web site traffic are:

1. Email marketing
2. Pay per click advertising
3. Social media marketing
4. Blogging
5. SEO and link building

For the small business with a limited budget, I’d recommend email marketing, social media marketing, and blogging.

For the medium sized to larger business, I’d recommend all of the above actions.

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Growing Your Email List

by John Eberhard

I started doing email marketing about 10-11 years ago. Back then, we rented a lot of email lists and were very successful with it. But the heavy proliferation of spam a few years later ruined the rented email list market, and most of the time, rented lists do not work anymore.

But what DOES work is to build up an in-house email list of customers and prospects, and send a variety of emails to them regularly. That clutter of email spam is still there, but if you build a relationship with people, you will break through that clutter and people will open and read your emails.

Building the List

Let’s start with how to build your list.

1. Contact Form: the first thing you should definitely have on your site is a contact form. It should ask minimally for the person’s name, email, and phone number, and usually include a “comments/questions” field. This is mainly for people who are interested in your product or service, and of course this is one of the most valuable reaches you will get, when someone fills out this form.

1. Newsletter Subscription: If your company does not offer an email newsletter, you should consider it. It’s a great way to build your list, and a great free offering. Of course you have to then actually create a newsletter and send it out regularly and write interesting and informative material to put in it. If you are just starting with offering an email newsletter, then you should do it monthly or quarterly.

1. Free Report: You can also create a “free report” (sometimes called a “white paper”) on some topic related to your industry. Then you offer that for free on your web site, but you make people fill out a form and give you their name and email address in order to get it. The idea is that if the report is on some topic that relates directly to the product or service that you sell, then the only people who would ask for it would likely be prospects for your company. I have used this strategy successfully with quite a few companies over the years. Of course you want to pick a topic that will be hot and will attract a lot of people to request the report. See my earlier article on this.

There are other things you could offer, such as software demos if you sell software. But the key is that you are offering several free things on your web site that will entice people to fill out that form and give you their name and email address. That way, you collect the names of people who are your prospects but who are not ready to buy something right now. If you are only offering one of the above, you should consider adding more to the mix.

Email Services

It really makes sense to set up an account with one of the online email services (like Aweber, Mailchimp, or Constant Contact) and have those people who fill out the forms on your web site dumped into an online database. It’s easier to send email to a list if it is stored in one of the online email services, and you can also set up an autoresponder to send them several emails selling your services. Plus it is automated in terms of people signing up and also unsubscribing, so you don’t have to do that manually.

I have used all these services, and Aweber and Mailchimp are the best. Constant Contact is the worst, in terms of the options it gives you.

What to Send

Now you have an email list and are gradually increasing the size of the list. So what do you send to it?

1. Email Newsletter: As discussed above, this is a good thing to send to your list.
2. Testimonials: Put together emails containing success stories from happy clients.
3. General Sales Pieces: You can put together sales emails, one apiece on all your various products or services, and including a link to where they can buy the item or get more info on it on your web site.
4. Sales or Specials: Whenever you put something on sale or have a special, you should definitely send out emails about it, probably more than once over the course of the special.
5. Announcements: If you have something to announce, such as a new product or service, send out an email on it.

Frequency

A big question is how often do you send to the list? How much is too much?

Well I definitely believe in being aggressive and sending to an email list often. You may have to experiment a bit to see what works for you, and watch how many people are unsubscribing. If you are getting a lot of people unsubscribing from the list, you may be pushing the envelope too much.

Generally I think sending email to a list between 2 and 8 times per month is acceptable. I send to my prospect and client list about 4-6 times per month. I talked to one organization recently that is sending out 5 emails per week or 20 per month. That’s a lot. But it is working for them and they don’t get too many people asking to be off the list. So you have to see what works for you.

Good luck with website marketing via your in-house email list.

Thanks to Jane Milan for the suggestion of this topic.

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Web Site Conversions

by John Eberhard

The whole idea behind website marketing of a commercial web site, meaning a web site for a business, is to get people to respond. When someone goes to a web site and responds to you in some way, we call that a “conversion.” Conversions could include:

1. Someone calling you on the phone, from the web site
2. Someone filling out a form asking for more information
3. Someone filling out a form to be on your newsletter email list
4. Someone filling out a form asking for some free item you are offering like a free report or white paper
5. Someone clicking on an email link on the site and emailing you
6. Someone buying something via a shopping cart on your site

Sometimes those things are called the “desired actions.”

Obviously we want as many people to respond and become conversions as possible. But of course not everyone is going to respond, for a variety of reasons.

So if you have a web site, and the site is set up in such a way as to allow or encourage people or ask them to respond in some way, and you’re NOT getting many or any conversions, then what do you do?

The very first thing you should do, if you are getting few or no conversions, is to find out how many people are actually coming to the web site. And this means a web statistics program or service.

There are many such web statistics services available, and most web hosting programs have a free web statistics program. But most of these are just terrible. I recommend people to use Google Analytics, which is free and is very good. You have to set up an account, then take the code they give you and put that on every page of your site. If you have a Wordpress site, you have to install a plugin that allows you to use Analytics, and then you just have to enter the account number and you’re set. I use a plugin called “Analytics WP.”

Once you are set up with Analytics, you should check the statistics once a week and see how much traffic you’re getting. If you do graphs for your business you should do a graph for web site visits weekly.

So let’s take a scenario. Let’s say you are only getting 2 conversions, meaning people responding to you, per month. Then you get Google Analytics installed on your web site and a few weeks later you see that you are only getting around 100 visits per week, or 400 per month. If you are getting 2 conversions per month with 400 visits to the site, that’s a conversion percentage of 0.5%.

Your problem in that case is simply that you are not getting enough people visiting your site. Your program then is clear: drive more traffic, via Google AdWords, sending out emails, social media, press releases, and so on. You need more traffic.

But now let’s take the other side of the coin. Same situation of 2 conversions per month, but after checking your traffic you find out you are getting 1,200 visits per week. That’s a conversion percentage of 0.04%.

Now you know that your web site is not set up properly to take advantage of that traffic. If you examine your site with a critical and fresh view, you will probably find one or more of the following:

a. It’s hard to buy stuff or hard to find where to do it.
b. Your newsletter signup form, if you have one, is not on the sidebar on every page (which it should be).
c. The phone number is not on every page or is hard to find
d. Your contact page is non-existent or hard to find.
e. You have no free offers to entice people to respond who maybe are not ready to buy right now.

If you find any or all of the above, you can make changes to the site to make it easier or more obvious for people to respond, or add some free offers if you don’t have any.

Now let’s wrap up by talking about conversion percentages. Ed Dale, well known Australian web marketing guru and organizer of the yearly 30 Day Challenge training program, says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for a web site. That means you’d get one conversion for every 200 visitors to the site. In that case he is specifically talking about online sales, which are usually going to have a lower percentage than with lead generation.

If you are doing lead generation, meaning you’re trying to get leads that a salesman will call and close, I think an acceptable conversion percentage is anywhere from 1% to 5%. If you are getting less than 1%, you need to work on the web site, making it easier to find stuff, and adding some free offers.

But I find that in most cases when I ask someone what kind of traffic they’re getting to the web site and they don’t know, then the problem is almost always really low numbers of visitors to the site. And in that case the program is to start generating more traffic, because you need thousands of visitors.

Good luck with your web site conversions.

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Why Article Marketing is Important

by John Eberhard

Article marketing means to write an article and then distribute that article around to various web sites called article directories. Article marketing is an important part of link building, which is often lumped in with the subject of search engine optimization.

My company does a lot of link building for clients. The purpose is to build up a lot of links to the client web site from other sites. The reason for this is that for Google, the number of links to a web site from other sites is their top criteria for determining the ranking of that web site. So the higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you will get from them.

I use several methods to build up links to web sites. But the most effective method I have found for building high volume links is article marketing. I use other methods to build quality links, but for quantity, it’s article marketing, hands down.

The first step is to write an article. This should be a minimum of 500 words, and should be about some topic of interest related to your product or your industry. It should not be a pitch directly about buying your products or services, but should be informational.

Aside from building links, writing and distributing articles is a way of establishing you as a reliable information source. For many companies, this is an important strategy today in making you and your company a trusted place to do business. By writing an article with relevant, correct information, you are demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about.

Once the article is written, I usually distribute it to between 50 and 100 article directories. Some of the top directories are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are several of what I consider premium article directories, including:
http://www.squidoo.com
http://knol.google.com/k
http://business.blinkweb.com/

We used to consider HubPages.com a premium article directory, but they have demonstrated that they are really anti-marketing, so we don’t bother with them anymore. Not sure why a site like that would even exist if it was anti-marketing, but there you go.

The best frequency is to write and send out an article to at least 50 article directories, at least once a month. Sending out to 100 directories is better, and sending more than one article per month is better too. We have some clients where we distribute one article per week.

By following a program of at least 100 article submissions per month, it is possible to build up links from practically none to over 2,000 links within several months.

You can check your number of links on Google by entering this in the search line:

“yourwebsite.com” -site:yourwebsite.com

I hesitate to give that because every time I do someone complains that it doesn’t work. But it does. It’s your web site address, in quotes, then a space, a dash, the word “site,” a colon, and your web address again without quotes. You enter that in the Google search field. It will then say at the top “About 27,700 results” (as it did for my web site just now). That’s the number of links.

If you do that for some of your competitor sites, that will give you an idea of how many links you will need to be able to rank well for your industry.

Good luck with link building and search engine rankings.

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Promotional Strategy When Times Are Tough

by John Eberhard

Years ago I worked for a software company as the VP Marketing. It was policy at that company that each week they would allocate 20% of the gross income for promotional expenses, things like ads, direct mail, trade show expenses, and so on. This was before the Internet and website marketing.

I was in charge of that promotional budget, so each week my staff would prepare the purchase orders and I would sort through them to select what I thought was the best way to spend that money, then I would submit those to the financial planning committee.

There was one time where the company’s income was lower than usual for several weeks. Of course every company goes through this from time to time, and of course it creates a problem for financial planning. Because the question is how do you pay all the bills, make payroll, etc.? I was on the financial planning committee then and I’ve been on it in a number of companies since then, and I can tell you it is always a challenge. But if you are a business owner, you already know that.

The Executive Director of the company at the time had the idea that we would dramatically cut the percentage of gross income going to promo. I objected to this of course, not just because it was my personal fiefdom so to speak, but because I had observed that there was a direct proportion between the money spent and the amount of promo sent out, to the number of leads that came in, and to the sales, and to the income.

Well the ED was undeterred by my objections and we embarked on a period of six weeks where the promo allocation dropped to 6% of the gross income.

What do you think happened?

Do you think we recovered to our previous level of income?

No we did not. In fact, the gross income dropped even lower during that six week period. At the end of that period, the owner of the company stepped in and removed the Executive Director and appointed a new one. The policy of 20% to promo was reinstated, and the company slowly climbed back up to its previous level of income.

What I learned from that experience was that it is vital to maintain a promotional budget, and that it is especially important when the gross income dips below its normal level. Cutting the promo budget is not the solution when the income is down. If anything, it is more important to maintain or increase promo levels when income is down.

Over the years I worked for a number of companies in the capacity as a Director or VP of Marketing. And those companies all had different policies on how much money they put towards promo items. The software company mentioned above allocated 20%, some allocated 14%, some 10%. I’ve seen some smaller companies that put no money towards promo at all, but existed entirely on referrals and repeat business. But even those companies eventually reached a point in their expansion cycle where they had to start promoting and spending some money on promo.

So no matter what percentage of your income you are putting towards promo items, when income dips, it is vital to maintain or even increase the amount of promotional actions you are doing. It’s not easy. I’ve sat on that financial planning committee and I know it’s not easy. But it is the route to survival and expansion.

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Logistics for Re-Designing a Web Site

by John Eberhard

When you decide to have your web site re-designed, there are some logistical considerations that you should be aware of.

Keeping the Same Hosting Company

If you have a web hosting account that you are happy with, then your web designer should create a new sub-folder on your web site and put the newly designed web site there. That way you can view what he is doing by putting in your web address plus the new folder, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/new.>

In this way your web designer can build the new web site, and upload the files to the sub-folder, and you can look at it on your computer, give him edits or changes, and give him final approval before the new site is live.

Once you have a finalized design and content that you have approved, then your web designer can upload all the new files into the root folder and the new site will become live. He should also, before he uploads all the new files, download all your old files and keep them on his hard disk just in case anything goes wrong.

Switching Hosting Companies

If you are not happy with your hosting company for whatever reason, then the best thing is to have your web designer start a new hosting account and build the new site there. He will be able to give you a preview web address so you can view the new site while he is working on it.

I typically use GoDaddy and Hostgator for setting up new hosting accounts for client web sites. They are inexpensive ($5-8 per month) and I have had a good experience with both. GoDaddy’s basic hosting account is $5 per month and they have a “deluxe” hosting account for $8 per month where you can host multiple web sites for the same price.

While your web designer is working on the new site in the new hosting account, your old web site will still be live. Visitors to the site will still see your old site until you’re ready to make the switch.

Once you preview the new site and approve everything, now the switchover can occur. The way this is done is that you have to know where the web address was registered, i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc. And you have to have the login information for your account. Your account with one of the domain registrars is separate from your hosting account, though some companies like GoDaddy do both domain registration and hosting.

So once you find the domain registrar login information (I find most clients have to dig to find this) then you log into the account, and switch the DNS (domain name servers). This means that the web address, or domain, will now point to a different computer, the computer at your new hosting company that holds your new web site files.

There is a record, contained in every web server across the planet, that includes every single web address, and what computer the files for that web address are on. Let’s say your old hosting company for your www.mywidgets.com web site was located in New Jersey. That record would point to that specific computer inside the hosting company in New Jersey, and so every time someone would type in www.mywidgets.com, their computer would be directed to that computer in New Jersey and pull up the files from that computer.

So now let’s say your new hosting company is in Arizona. Once you switch the DNS, that record gets updated on every web server across the planet, and it now points to that new computer in Arizona. Now when someone types in your web address, they get directed to that computer in Arizona and the files get pulled from that computer.

When you switch the DNS, it takes about 24 hours for the records to be “propagated,” which means they get updated on every web server across the planet.

Good luck with your web site re-design.

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Understanding Wordpress

by John Eberhard

Wordpress has a number of different applications and uses and I thought I would take this article to explain them.

Turning Your Site into a Wordpress Blog

First of all, Wordpress is a blogging system that you can install on your website to make it into a blog. A blog, for those who don’t know, is a special type of website where you post new content regularly, and as you post new things, the older content moves further down the page. See my client news blog for an example. http://realwebclientnews.com/

So you can install Wordpress on your website and it will become a blog. The Wordpress software system is free, and most hosting companies will set it up for you, either by clicking a few buttons online or by calling them. You can also download the latest version of Wordpress from www.wordpress.org and then upload them to your site, but this is much more time consuming.

Once you install the Wordpress software on your site, you can choose from hundreds of pre-designed Wordpress “themes,” which are basically pre-packaged designs, for your blog. Once you select a theme, you can customize it to your liking, adding your company name and logo. You can also have a web designer create a totally customized design for your blog.

Putting up a blog this way means you will have to have a hosting account and pay a monthly hosting fee.

Using Wordpress as Content Management System (CMS)

Over the last few years it has become more and more popular to use Wordpress as a content management system (CMS). A CMS allows the web site owner, once the site has been designed and set up, to log into an online interface, and make changes to the site themselves, without involving a web designer.

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging system, but since its interface is relatively simple to use (compared to other CMSes) it has become popular to use it as a CMS.

You will still need a web designer to set up Wordpress and customize it for you. Once again you can select a Wordpress theme and have your designer add customizations, or you can have a web designer create a totally customized design and convert it into a Wordpress format.

Once your site is set up in Wordpress, the types of things you can change on your site are:

1. Changing or adding text on one of the pages
2. Adding pictures to a page
3. Removing or changing a picture on a page
4. Adding or removing pages (of course here you have to be careful not to delete pages that are part of your navigation system)

For more complex changes than the above, you will still need to bring in an experienced web designer.

A lot of people are going in this direction today, using Wordpress as a CMS.

A couple of totally custom web sites that I built recently and then converted into Wordpress format include http://bigtreesupply.com/ and http://www.truax.net/.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a free blogging site where you can create an account, and set up a free blog. For example, you can see my articles blog: http://realwebmarketingnet.wordpress.com/

As you can see the web address will include your blog title, then …wordpress.com at the end. But the advantage of starting an account on Wordpress.com is that it is free. You don’t have to pay a monthly hosting fee. You can also choose a theme from the large collection of free themes that Wordpress has, and you can customize it somewhat.

There are several free blogging sites where you can set up a free blog, but Wordpress.com is my personal favorite, because it is built on the Wordpress architecture and so it is much easier to customize that any of the others (some of the other free blog sites are almost impossible to customize).

Plugins

Wordpress has hundreds of things called “plugins” that you can add to your site to give it more functionality. For example, you can add plugins that will allow you to add photo galleries, email forms, a feed from Facebook or Twitter, search engine optimization features, or add Google Analytics (web statistics) to your site or blog. Wordpress plugins can add a lot of depth to your site.

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