How to Decide Which Website Marketing Actions to Do

by John Eberhard

Whenever a new prospect comes to me, the first thing that I try to do is understand their business and then figure out a strategy, or which of the various website marketing actions would be best for them. I don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach. I think you have to approach each business individually and see how that fits with each of the online techniques.

Local, Regional, National

Whether a business is local in nature (i.e. a restaurant, health care practice, home improvement company) or regional or national (servicing people in a large region or in the whole country) makes a big difference in which online marketing techniques will work for you.

So let’s take a look at the various online marketing techniques and how to evaluate what is best for your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Regular SEO is international in nature. You will be competing with other companies worldwide for keywords.
• Takes 6 months or more to bear fruit
• In competitive markets and for competitive keywords it can be time consuming to get to the point of ranking well
• Once you rank well, maintaining that is easier and less expensive
• Link building is an important element of search engine optimization

Local SEO

This is where you do SEO but concentrate on keywords that contain city or town names in them.

• Easier to get to the point of ranking well for local oriented keywords

One caution with local SEO, which is that there are guys out there pitching that they can get you to rank on page one of Google for keywords related to your industry that include your city names. The problem is that I have seen in several instances, these guys didn’t say anything to the client about how many people were actually searching for those keywords. And I can tell you that many of these city name keywords get little to no search traffic. The result is maybe you’re on page one of Google for that keyword now, but if no one searches for it, it won’t do you any good. The moral is to ask in all cases what the search traffic is for all the keywords being discussed.

Google Maps/Places

• Practically a necessity for local oriented businesses
• There is a whole procedure to get your listing online and push it up to page one of Google results
• Some industries are very competitive (like dentists) and each city has a hundred or more listings. So getting on page one is not a slam dunk and takes time and work. If your industry doesn’t have a lot of listings up there, you can get to page one relatively quickly, but if there is a lot of competition, figure 4-6 months of work.
• There are other sites one should put up a listing on as well, such as Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Insider Pages, Hotfrog and others
• Getting positive online reviews is important in getting your listing to page one on Google

Social Media Marketing

• Can target a local area or region with social media marketing
• Can target specific industries
• The main challenge is developing a large list of friends, followers or connections
• Inexpensive
• Great for companies that have frequent events, products to showcase, pictures of products or services, or videos on YoutTube
• You have to develop an effective strategy of what type of messages to send out 

Pay Per Click Advertising

• Puts you in more control of how your listing appears, where it appears and how soon
• Can target any geographical area, from national down to small towns
• Great for developing a consistent flow of leads
• More expensive
• Only viable for high ticket items (say items selling for over $200)

Pay per click advertising has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately and it seems some people have gotten a bad taste in their mouth from it. I think this is due to the fact that more and more businesses have gotten involved in it and thus there is more competition, which has driven the bids up to non-viable levels in some cases. I think pay per click can still be viable in many cases, but it is more important to have a knowledgeable person manage the account, and to track both email and phone call responses.

Video Marketing

• Important for services or products that are very visual in nature, or where some explanation is needed to sell it
• Relatively expensive to have done for you, or time consuming if you do it yourself (assuming you do a professional job of it)
• Great for personalizing your company

Email Marketing

• Great if you can build up a sizable in-house list of prospects and customers
• Also great if you can find email lists where you actually take possession of the list and can mail to it repeatedly without having to pay a rental fee each time
• Email newsletters work great

Blogging

• Drives traffic if you post 2-4 times per month
• Can’t really target people locally. You’ll be getting readers from all over.
• Put links in the sidebar to the stuff you’re selling
• Make sure to send a notification (called a ping) out to blog search engines after each post. Wordpress blogs do this automatically.

Good luck with choosing your website marketing strategy.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Landing Pages 2012

By John Eberhard

A landing page is a page on your web site where you have someone arrive, or land, when they click on some kind of online promotion. This promotion could be an email with a link at the bottom, a pay per click ad, a banner ad, a press release, or any other promotional action online that offers a link to your web site.

Typically it is a good idea to create a customized landing page to have your visitors land on, rather than have them land on your home page. This is pretty much considered common knowledge in the Internet marketing community. Yet I still often see Google AdWords campaigns, for example, that have the visitor land on the company’s web site home page.

The reasons that it is important to have visitors land on a customized landing page are:

a. Having a customized landing page allows you to tailor the content of the page to exactly what the person is responding to and looking for.

b. Landing the person on your home page forces him to search around on your home page for the link to exactly what he is looking for. A customized landing page saves him the time and trouble.

c. A customized landing page can be coded in such a way that when your visitor responds, you know exactly where that reach came from.

What Goes on the Page?

There are some definite do’s and don’ts regarding what should be on a customized landing page. These are things that affect the percentage of people that respond, which we of course want to be as high as possible.

1. Sales copy: You want to have sales copy on that page. Some people say to make the sales copy short and sweet. Others say that long copy sells. The only way to know for sure for your product or service is to test it both ways. Make sure what you talk about in your copy matches the ad or email.

2. Pictures: Include several pictures on the landing page that illustrate what the sales copy is talking about.

3. Branding: Be sure to include a header at the top of the page showing your company logo. Since this is potentially the first contact the person will have with you, the branding shows him that you are legitimate.

4. Testimonials: Putting one or two testimonials on the landing page is always good, as it gives you more credibility.

5. No navigation: I nearly always have a hard time getting clients to accept this, but I have found over 12+ years of experience in both email and pay per click landing pages, that it works better to not have navigational buttons on a landing page. When I say it works better, I mean that in roughly 90% of cases a landing page with no navigation, where the visitor’s only choices are to read your copy and respond to your offer, gets higher percentage of response than when you give him the option to navigate around your site. When you give them navigation buttons, they wander around your site and then leave. Keeping them on the one page focuses and better controls the experience and process. The only exception I have found to this is with home improvement companies with a highly visual and aesthetic product, where the visitor will want to see a photo gallery. In all other cases, I have found that the response percentage is higher when the landing page does not have navigation buttons.

6. Call to action and offer: It’s important to have a clear call to action, i.e. telling the prospect to respond, and to put this prominently at the bottom of your page, or in the right sidebar. Lately I have been testing putting the call to action in the right sidebar rather than at the bottom of the page and this has been working well. It is always helpful to offer something specific, and if you can offer something free, usually information that can be sent electronically and cost you nothing, that usually increases response.

7. Response form: It is vital to put both a response form and a phone number on your landing page.

8. Coding: You can code the response form so that the subject line of the email that arrives in your inbox will include a name or code that tells you where that person came from. I favor doing separate landing pages for each campaign so you know that the person came from your Campaign #1 on Google or whatever.

9. Multimedia: I have extensively tested putting video clips or audio clips on landing pages, and have found that in most cases it increases response to have multimedia on the page. You can set your audio clip, for instance, to start playing as soon as the person lands on the page. But make sure to put a button there for the person to turn off the clip if they want.

Testing and Tracking

Testing different copy, pictures, multimedia, testimonials, offers and other elements on your landing page is very important. Every time you make a change, make sure that you code the new campaign or landing page in some way, so you can track the response and compare it to earlier versions. I use 4-digit codes on all my landing pages and find this works well.

Testing and carefully tracking the results has been a vital part of direct marketing actions for over 20 years. It’s no different with the Internet and if anything, it is easier to track things with the Internet.

I now favor using some sort of phone tracking system, where you use different phone numbers for your different campaigns, the calls are all recorded in an online system, and the call is then bounced to your main number. This eliminates a notoriously weakness of most companies, where they are bad at tracking where phone call leads came from.

Good luck with your landing page and website marketing efforts.

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How You Respond to the Economy

By John Eberhard

Occasionally I hear someone saying that there is no recession and you can’t believe all that junk you read in the newspapers. If you just have a positive attitude it will all come out all right and things will be great.

I think this is a foolish, Polyanna sort of response to the economy. But I think there are ways to be positive and survive tough economic times. So what is the right response to this economic situation that we are in?

Well first of all I think it is important to realistically assess conditions in the environment. We have been in a recession for a couple years even if the government tries to tell us it ended over a year ago.

That means that consumers are right now less likely to buy things that are considered luxuries, and even with necessities, they will in some cases tend to buy less of them or delay the purchase. This is what I am seeing with clients.

So while I don’t feel I am a pessimist and I don’t urge people to be pessimists, I think you do have to see what is actually there. Then how should you respond to it?

Well I do agree that the news media try to make it all worse, and the effect on us tends to be that we accept a new reality of lowered expectations. In other words, we get sort of apathetic and feel like things just won’t be as good as they were before.

And you can look back to before the recession started, and it is true that there were some artificial conditions there with the real estate boom and the government pushing lenders to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and all that. So the real estate market and mortgage market is probably not going to come back to its 2005 levels anytime soon.

But what about other industries? I think that for other industries, it is up to us. And what I mean by that is, as a business owner or marketer, you can’t get caught up too much in the pessimism. Yes, you have to know what is going on, but you have to also continue to promote your product or service aggressively.

By promoting your business aggressively and actively doing website marketing, you are creating a new more prosperous reality for the future. The idea is to “out-create” the downturn. Of course you have to have promotional campaigns that work and part of that is having good surveys of your target public.

And incidentally, you might need new surveys, if your last surveys were done prior to the recession or crash or whatever you want to call it. Because their attitudes towards buying your product have probably changed since then. And your promotion needs to speak properly to the attitudes they have now.

So the key in my opinion is:

1. Don’t get discouraged
2. Know what’s going on in your market and in the economy
3. Keep promoting and marketing aggressively
4. Make sure you have the right message that will speak to your public and their attitudes now.

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Case History: SEO and Social Media Client

By John Eberhard

I have a client who does what she calls “developmental editing,” or in other words, editing of the manuscripts of writers. She doesn’t just edit for spelling and grammar, but helps the author really develop the story and the characters. Quite a few of her clients have had their works published by traditional publishers and one of her author clients was just recently signed to a multi-movie deal.

This client came to me in August 2010 and wanted search engine optimization (SEO) done for her web site.

We did keyword research, wrote titles and descriptions and put all that information in the appropriate places on her site. Then we set up multiple blogs for her, and embarked on a link building program that included taking one of her articles and posting it each month on articles directories and on some high profile sites like Squidoo.com and Google Knol, and writing a press release each month and posting it on online PR sites. Both the articles and press releases have also been posted on her multiple blogs.

Then in June 2011 we started working this client’s Twitter account, by adding new followers and posting status updates. When we started this client had 4 followers on Twitter, and we started targeting writers. At first I was doing about 8 status updates for her per month, then a few months ago I switched to doing what are called “auto tweets,” where the software I use sends out 20 tweets per day that I have written for her. These tweets give links to various pages on her web site and to her various articles with advice to writers.

When I started working with this client in August 2010, she was getting around 200 visits to her web site per month. She had 8 keywords on page one of Google and 11 keywords one page one and two. In the first month that we tracked it she got 77 organic referrals from Google, which means 77 times someone searched on Google and clicked on an organic, or non-paid listing that appeared there and arrived on her site. She had 722 links to her site.

In November 2011 this client’s web site got 528 visits, and in December the site got 775 visits, which represents a 287% increase over the traffic the site was getting when we started tracking it. In December the site got 196 organic referrals from Google. She now has 17 keywords on page one of Google and 23 keywords on pages one and two. The site now has 11,200 links to it. And this client now has 2,118 followers on Twitter.

But the real shocker this past month came from Twitter. In December this client got 214 referrals from Twitter. That means 214 people saw a status update on her Twitter account and clicked on the link and came to her site. Of course it helps that she now has 2,118 followers. But the auto tweets appear to be the main cause of that big increase in traffic from Twitter.

A friend told me he was doing the auto tweets and that it was really working for him. I was skeptical of it at first but decided to pilot it on several of my clients. Now I am really sold.

The above shows what a solid SEO program can do when you do consistent link building over a period of time, and it also shows the power of a social media marketing program.

 

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Wordpress and Catalyst

by John Eberhard

Wordpress is a blogging system, arguably the best. But because it is so easy to use, many people today also use it to develop whole web sites.

Using Wordpress as a platform to develop a web site allows the site owner to log in and easily make changes to the content of the site themselves. When I say “content” I am referring to the text and pictures. (To make design changes you need more web design knowledge.)

This easy access to the web site - allowing the site owner to make content changes - seems to be very appealing today, and so more and more people are opting to have their sites designed in Wordpress or a similar Content Management System (CMS). I like Wordpress because I feel it is the easiest to learn, and for that reason it appears to be becoming the most popular.

I started working with Wordpress a couple years ago and in the last year have made several sites in Wordpress (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Then finally I made the leap and re-designed my own site in Wordpress and put the new version up live last week.

Themes

Once you set up your site in Wordpress, you have to select a theme. A “theme” is their word for the overall design for the site. You can select from hundreds of pre-made, free themes. Most of these are pretty plain and so most people have a custom design done for them, which is then converted into Wordpress format.

Initially I created custom designs and then had someone else convert these to Wordpress for me. Then I discovered a custom theme called Catalyst, which you buy and install, and it then gives you hundreds of design options. So now I use Catalyst to create my designs. It has a bit of a learning curve to it, but overall I think it’s a great product.

Other Advantages of Wordpress

Other than the obvious advantage that Wordpress allows you to make changes to your web site yourself, there are a number of other advantages.

1. Easy, site-wide changes: With Wordpress you can make changes to the design or to the navigation, and you just have to make the change once and it goes into effect for the whole site, rather than making the change on every page. This is probably more important for designers.

2. Plugins: Wordpress has hundreds of what they call “plugins,” which are small programs that work within WP to give you added functionality. Here are examples of some of the available types of plugins:

a. Photo Galleries: There are some really high quality photo galleries available. I like the NextGen Gallery the best.

b. Google Analytics: You can hook up Google Analytics to your site so you can track visitors, in about 10 minutes.

c. Forum: You can set up a forum on your site pretty easily.

d. Polls: You can run polls on your site.

e. SEO: You can install a plugin that makes it easy to implement search engine optimization on your site.

f. Events Calendar: You can put an events calendar on your site.

g. Forms: There are a number of plugins that make it easy to create forms for your site.

h. Facebook and Twitter: There are plugins that make it easy to interact with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, such as showing a feed of recent activity.

i. Buddypress: This is a plugin allowing you to set up a Facebook-like social networking site of your own. I haven’t used it but hear it is pretty easy to work with.

j. Share: You can add “share this” type buttons to allow visitors to share a page on social media sites.

k. Backup: You can get a plugin that makes it easy to regularly back up the contents of your Wordpress site.

l. Nivo Slider: A “slider” is a new term for a slide show. Nivo makes a really slick slider that you can set up on your Wordpress site (it comes free for Catalyst owners). I set up one of these on my home page, and it has really cool transition effects between the slides.

Overall I think that moving to a Wordpress site has a lot of advantages today.

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