Real Web Marketing Blog

Landing Pages 2012

2012-01-24T12:46:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-17T16:46:00.001-08:00

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:

Don’t get discouraged
Know what’s going on in your market and in the economy
Keep promoting and marketing aggressively
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

2012-01-10T15:19:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-03T12:16:00.001-08:00

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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Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2012

2011-12-27T12:54:00.001-08:00

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.

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

2011-12-20T13:44:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-13T17:07:00.001-08:00

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:

Submitting articles to article directories
Writing press releases and submitting these to online PR sites
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

2011-12-06T12:57:00.001-08:00

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:

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.

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.

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. 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.

2011-11-27T13:46:00.001-08:00

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

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The Local Business on the Internet

2011-11-22T17:18:00.001-08:00

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

2011-11-18T16:42:00.001-08:00

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

2011-11-18T16:08:00.001-08:00

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.”

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Video Marketing 102

2011-11-15T18:39:00.001-08:00

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

2011-11-08T14:15:00.001-08:00

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

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

2011-10-26T22:10:00.001-07:00

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:

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.
Innovate new products and services in the information or technology sector. Become the next Steve Jobs in your particular niche.
Work hard and deliver good service.
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

2011-10-11T12:37:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-04T19:10:00.001-07:00

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

2011-09-20T13:32:00.001-07:00

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

2011-09-13T12:52:00.001-07:00

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:

Email marketing
Pay per click advertising
Social media marketing
Blogging
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:

Email marketing
Pay per click advertising
Social media marketing
Blogging
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

2011-09-01T13:07:00.001-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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?

Email Newsletter: As discussed above, this is a good thing to send to your list.
Testimonials: Put together emails containing success stories from happy clients.
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.
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.
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

2011-08-25T13:51:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-16T13:12:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-09T12:16:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-02T13:17:00.001-07:00

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

2011-07-27T12:55:00.001-07:00

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:

Changing or adding text on one of the pages
Adding pictures to a page
Removing or changing a picture on a page
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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Social Media Marketing Summary

2011-07-18T19:39:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

I have written several articles recently on social media marketing and this article will summarize the most vital points from those articles.

Adding Friends

Before I summarize the past articles, here is a bit of new. If you want to use social media sites to market your business, you have to have a lot of friends (Facebook), followers (Twitter), and connections (LinkedIn). Because if you want to put out messages promoting your business on social media, you need to have those messages seen by a lot of people, otherwise it won’t do any good.

So you have to develop a strategy of adding friends/followers/connections on a regular basis. It works best to do this a little bit every day, or at least 4-5 days per week, rather than trying to do a whole lot at once. The reason for this is that each of the sites has a concept of what they consider an acceptable level of friending activity, and if you exceed that in a short period of time, they will either shut down your account temporarily or permanently.

Facebook allows a max of 5,000 friends, but there is no limit to the number of fans for a fan page. I use software to add followers for Twitter and have gotten my own account up to near 10,000 and two other accounts over 2,000 followers.

Social Media Outflow Strategy

What type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

You should set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts.

But back to what you should say. Here are some tips.

2. Every time you post new content on your blog, you should put out a status update saying “See my new blog post,” then the name of your article, then a link to it. Since the number of characters you get on Twitter (and Ping.fm) is only 140, it makes sense to use a URL shortener for the address of the article, such as www.goo.gl.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

10. Avoid making every single status update a pitch for your business. While you should post about all your seminars, classes, speeches, webinars, or trade show appearances, if all you ever post are pitches for your promotional actions, it could cause people to tune you out or even hide your posts or unfriend you. I think it is helpful to throw in some personal stuff, like a trip you’re taking, or a sports event or concert you attended.

It is definitely a good idea to post status updates to your social media accounts frequently. It all comes under the heading of creating top of mind awareness. Using these tips you can increase your posting frequency.

Social Media Engagement

There is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page is a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, click through to their page and where it says “Write something,” write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers).

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Measuring Your Success

I was recently thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

1. Total Online Community Size: Add up your total Facebook fans of your fan page and/or friends for your profile, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, YouTube channel subscribers, and blog unique users.

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

If you are posting status updates on your social media accounts that link back to your site or mention things you are doing, this should be generating traffic, i.e. people clicking on the link and coming to your site.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

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Top Social Media Sites

2011-07-01T08:55:00.001-07:00

By John Eberhard

In the online world things seem to change, faster than fashion, faster than the weather, faster that yesterday’s clothes. What was the greatest thing last year could be completely washed up this year.

So it is with social media. In this article I will list out some of the current top social media sites. Except for the first couple, I am not claiming to rank these sites.

1. Facebook has really jumped into first place and doesn’t look like it will be leaving that spot anytime soon. I took a liking to this site from the beginning and have used it to market my business and make money. You start up a personal profile, can put up a fan page for your business (which has been enhanced in the last year), and can put up a pay per click ad campaign. If you have a fan page, you can now post a button on your regular web site for people to “like” the fan page. Of course the key with Facebook, either when marketing from your personal profile or from a fan page, is to have lots of friends (personal profile) or fans (fan page). You can post a status update with text, pictures or videos, and you can comment on other people’s posts, thus starting threads.

2. Twitter popularized the concept of “micro-blogging,” i.e. posting status updates with a max of 140 characters. You follow people, and others will follow you to see what you have to say. You can post what you’re doing with your business, and post links to your articles or videos or offers. It pays to use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl for any web addresses you include in your post, since the number of characters is so short. In terms of following people, you can target people who have certain keywords or phrases in their bio or in their “tweets.” You can also follow people that follow or are followed by another specific user.

3. LinkedIn is a popular business networking site. Your profile contains data on where you work now and where you’ve worked in the past, and you can connect to other people who have worked where you work or have worked in the past, or who have a lot of connections in common with you, or who are in your industry. You can post status updates just like Facebook or Twitter.

4. Ping.fm is a social media syndication site, which means that you can start up an account on it and then hook up all your other social media sites to it. It gives you a field to write your status updates in, with a limit of 140 characters just like Twitter. Then when you post something on Ping.fm, if you’ve hooked it up right, that post will go out to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other accounts. I like the idea of being able to send messages out to thousands of people at once, so I like this site.

5. MySpace. My how the mighty have fallen. MySpace used to be the top social media site a couple years ago, but has really dropped off. I personally think it is because of the idiotic way they let people customize their profile pages, so that every page you go to, you have to figure out where everything is. While I’m all in favor of originality, many people took it too far, some putting background images behind their page so you could not even read the text. I heard MySpace just got sold this week for $35 million, most of it in stock. That’s a pittance in this field. And I recently was working on adding friends to a client’s MySpace account, and had to struggle to get 50 in a month, because apparently hardly anyone goes on it anymore.

6. Wordpress.com is a free blogging site, where you can sign up and then put up a free blog on the topic of your choice. There are several free blogging sites but I personally like Wordpress.com the best because it is built on the Wordpress architecture, which gives you a lot of features and options. It also has a feature built in to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines, whenever you post anything.

I’ll explain something about Wordpress that many people don’t understand. Wordpress is a blogging system. You can download files from Wordpress.org, and install them on your hosting account and customize your blog in whatever way you want. Also most hosting companies will help you install Wordpress on your site so you don’t have to do the manual install which despite what Wordpress says, takes 30-45 minutes. Installing Wordpress on your site is free, and you can have your blog have whatever web address you want.

Wordpress.com on the other hand, is a free blogging site, and you start an account and your blog is then hosted on their site, and will have “Wordpress” in the URL (http://yourblogname.wordpress.com).

7. Blogger.com is perhaps the #2 free blogging site. You can start an account and put up a blog of your choice. They have a lot of users and are owned by Google, but I find them a lot harder to customize your page.

8. Posterous.com is another free blogging site. They have one very special feature, which is once you set up an account on Posterous, you can hook up all your other blogs to it. Then you post something on Posterous, and it goes out to all your other blogs automatically. Another great time saver.

9. Blog.com is another free blogging site. Like Wordpress.com, they use the Wordpress architecture which makes it easier to customize and gives you lots of features.

10. Squidoo is a fairly high traffic site where you can put up a page (called a “lens”) about some specific topic. This page can have an article, pictures, videos, and links to your blog or blogs. Your article can contain text links (called “anchor text”) which are the best type of links to have to your site. Squidoo seems to understand that people may want to use their site to market products or services, and they don’t seem to think that’s a crime or anything.

11. HubPages is another site similar to Squidoo, where you can put up a page and include an article, pictures, videos, etc. The only problem is that Hubpages does seem to think it’s a crime to market anything using their site, so they limit you to only one link per page, and will sometimes disapprove your article if they determine it is not completely unique, i.e. if the same article is posted anywhere else. So according to them, you’re supposed to write an article and put it up on their site and not anywhere else, and do it out of the philanthropy and goodness of your heart, with no desire to ever (gasp) make money or anything evil like that. Guess you can tell what I think of them.

12. Google Knol is a new site sort of similar to Squidoo and HubPages, where you can post articles. You can include pictures and links to your heart’s content, and since it is owned by Google my guess is it gives pretty good link juice.

Good luck with social media marketing.

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Search Engines: Local, Regional or National?

2011-06-23T14:43:00.001-07:00

By John Eberhard

I was recently talking to a guy who was interested in getting a new web site created. One of the questions he asked was “What about SEO (search engine optimization)?”

At that point my first question to him was “Is your business a local business?” Because if it is a local business, that changes the priorities of what you need to do in order to get your business to appear on search engines.

The Local Business

We will define a local business as any business that services customers or clients mainly or only in one city or metro area. Some examples are restaurants, dentists, chiropractors, doctors, or home improvement companies.

Google Maps, also called Google Places, has completely changed the landscape of search engine ranking and appearance for local businesses. Google started Google Maps a bit over a year ago.

Now, for any type of local search where Google can see that it is a local type of listing, it shows Google Maps information. That consists of a map (with red balloons showing where the local businesses in this category appear) which now appears in the right hand column, and individual listings, marked with a red balloon, in the wider left hand column.

Google typically displays 8-10 listings on the first page. This means essentially that for a local type of listing, like “dentist Glendale” or “restaurant Sylmar” (or even just “restaurant,” because Google knows what city you’re in) the Google Maps information completely dominates the first page.

So that really changes the picture of what a local business needs to do to rank well on Google. Instead of trying to rank well on Google’s organic (non-paid) listings for a term like “Italian restaurant,” in which you would be competing with other Italian restaurants worldwide, you now just have to get your restaurant appearing in Google Maps, and you just have to compete with other Italian restaurants in your local city.

So what do you have to do to get a listing on Google Maps and compete effectively with other local businesses in your area?

First of all you have to get a listing on Google Maps. Just because you have a Gmail account or Google AdWords or AdSense or Google Analytics account does NOT necessarily mean you automatically have a Google Maps account. If there is one up there (Google put up thousands of listings for businesses) then you have to claim it. There is a procedure for how to do that.
Next you have to get a lot of what are called “citations.” These are essentially listings of your business on other sites, like Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Hotfrog, and others. This helps to push your Google Maps listing toward the top. And believe me, in some cities and in some industries, there is a lot of competition.
Get lots of online reviews. These are where someone goes to one of the review sites, logs in or signs up for an account there, and writes a review on your business. For example, you have to have a Gmail or AdWords or Analytics or other type of Google account to write a review on Google. For an idea of how many reviews you need to get, look at the businesses that are showing up in your industry and in your area, on page one of Google Maps listings, and see how many reviews they have. We have developed systems to help clients get online reviews.

Regional or National Businesses

For regional or national businesses, the way to get your business to appear high on search engines, is either through:

Search engine optimization and link building, or
Pay per click advertising

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something you do once, or every three years or so. First you do research on potential keywords, and find ones that have decent amount of people searching for them, but a low number of sites competing for them. This usually ends up being what we call “long tail keywords,” meaning more detailed keyword phrases of more than one word. In most cases, single word keywords will have very high competition and you just won’t be able to compete or rank well for them.

Next you select the best keywords to work on, and put those into appropriate places on the pages of your web site, including into the titles and descriptions that appear on Google when your organic listing comes up.

Next you have to build up links to your web site on other web sites. Google says the number of links to your web site from other sites is the most important criteria for how well your site will rank for any given keywords. This does not mean writing to webmasters and offering to trade links. That is called reciprocal link building and Google discounted the value of it over three years ago. Amazingly some consultants still recommend it and do it.

The best ways we have found to do link building are:

Writing articles on your topic and submitting them to article directories. We have ways of making each one count as more than one link.
Writing press releases about your company and submitting them to online PR sites and putting them on blogs
Setting up accounts on free blogs and posting your articles and press releases on all of them, including several keywords in each article or release that are linked back to your site

So the first thing you have to do is determine if your business is local, regional or national. That will then define your direction for search engines.

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My Marketing Story

2011-06-13T09:18:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

I have been reading a couple of books lately that say that to create what they call “remarkable content,” you have to tell a story. So at the risk of boring everyone to tears I am going to tell the story of how I got involved in marketing and what it hopefully has taught me.

I didn’t sit in my room when I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a marketing consultant. I know that will shock everyone. I was into the arts as a kid. I drew, I painted, I did photography, I built things (I built my own toys), and I played music. After I saw Buddy Rich play when I was about 12, I decided I wanted to be a drummer, and to become rich and famous. I excelled at music in high school and ended up going to Berklee College of Music in Boston for two years and excelled there too.

After college I stayed in Boston and started playing music, but I also decided to work during the day for my church doing public relations. I started writing press releases, going out and doing “press runs” to the media, holding events, holding press conferences, appearing as a guest on TV and radio shows, and even hosting my own talk show on a cable TV station in Worcester, MA.

I really dug the fact of being able to communicate to thousands of people at one time. That was a kick.

Then I met my future wife, played music full time for a few years, and moved to Los Angeles. Unfortunately the music thing did not work out well for me in LA. But somehow I fell into marketing. I still remembered that thing about how I liked communicating to thousands of people, but I had not really liked the media people, who by and large are kind of slimey (i.e. you can’t trust them as far as you can throw them).

I saw an ad in the paper for a Marketing Director. I thought about it and decided “yeah, I could do that.” I worked as a marketing director for a year at a market research company and then moved to a medium-sized software company. I was the market research manager there and then was promoted to be in charge of marketing for North America. This was real on-the-job-training stuff, and I did a large course in marketing at the company’s training facility.

I soon learned that what I loved about marketing was twofold: a) I loved the fact that I could communicate to thousands of people, send out something to them and get them to respond (without dealing with the skeevy media people), and b) there are a lot of creative elements in marketing. There is copywriting, which is fun and creative, and design is of course very creative. And it was fun coming up with a campaign and planning it out and causing a big effect, i.e. lots of leads coming in and sales being made.

So I continued doing that for a number of years, working for a number of companies as Marketing Director or VP Marketing. I learned early on that you have to be aggressive in marketing and willing to communicate on a grand scale. And sometimes you have to fight for money to keep the promo going out, because some people will want to cut the funds for it when things get tight. And that is exactly when you should not cut the funds.

After working at those companies and being on the finance and management committees, I figured I’d learned enough about business to start my own. I started my own marketing consulting company part time while still working full time as an employee.

Then three years ago this month, I got laid off from my full time job. In some of the months prior to that, I had made almost as much money from the part time business as I had from my full time job. My wife and I looked at it, and decided to take the plunge. The company that I had been working for full time hired us out of the gate to do some of their marketing, and Real Web Marketing Inc. was born.

There have been ups and downs, and challenging periods when the economy seemed to be kicking our butts. But I remembered the lessons I had learned many years ago, that you have to keep promoting, and be aggressive, and not be afraid to communicate on a grand scale. As a result we have started to really expand our operations lately. And since I really enjoy it, especially the creative aspects, it’s been fun. And especially that being your own boss thing.

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Measuring Success with Social Media

2011-05-31T13:27:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

I have started doing a lot of social media marketing work for clients where I add friends, followers and connections to their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. I was adding friends for them on MySpace too but have recently discovered that hardly anyone is using MySpace anymore, so I am dropping that from the mix.

All this got me thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications. This is also something you should be working on regularly to increase these numbers.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

I recently found that posting press releases on two specific online PR sites caused over 150 people to tweet the title of my press release and link to it from their Twitter accounts. I found this out by searching for my company name on Twitter.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. This is of course what you are doing rather than how people are responding to you. But I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond. See my article from last week on what you should put out.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

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Your Social Media Outflow Strategy

2011-05-24T13:29:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

Last week I talked about how you should engage with your friends, followers and connections on social media, and respond to their communications.

But what type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

Well first of all I have recommended in the past that you set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts and you don’t have to log into a bunch of accounts to send your message. That saves a lot of time.

But back to what you should say. Your strategy of course will have to work with your personality and what you feel comfortable saying in your social media marketing. But here are some tips.

1. I have had a successful strategy with regard to my business, whereby I post messages saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am setting up a new Google AdWords account for a client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am adding more Twitter followers for a client.” I was telling a friend about this recently and his reaction was “Isn’t that really boring?” I suppose you could say that it is. But what it does do is create good “top of mind awareness.” That’s where when someone thinks of an Internet marketing consultant, I’m one of the guys they think of. I have gotten substantial business from social media using this strategy. You may be able to use this strategy to create top of mind awareness for your company.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it. Usually these are offered in such a way that the person has to give you his name and email to get the report, as a method of lead generation. So post a link to the signup page.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

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RealWebMarketing.net Launches New Site for Marketing for Landscapers

2011-05-17T21:55:00.001-07:00

Site to Offer Landscaping Companies Web Design, Pay Per Click, and Google Maps

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new web site called Landscaper-Marketing.com (http://www.landscaper-marketing.com) offering online marketing services specifically for landscaping companies.

The new website offers landscaping companies web design, pay per click advertising setup and maintenance, and Google Maps setup and maintenance.

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net, stated, “This is a vital time of year for landscape designers and contractors across the U.S., because their biggest time of the year and biggest surge of business is in the spring and early summer. So now is the ideal time for them to get their web site re-designed if it needs it, and to promote using pay per click advertising or getting a listing up on Google Maps. Promoting your business is never more important than in a time of economic downturn like we’re seeing today. The key is promoting more, not cutting back.”

RealWebMarketing.net recently launched a new major web re-design for Big Trees Inc., (http://www.bigtreesupply.com) a large tree nursery in the Seattle area, and is now managing pay per click advertising and link building for Big Trees.

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 direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, pool remodeling, 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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Social Media Engagement

2011-05-17T09:45:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

In past articles I’ve talked about the necessity of getting lots of friends, followers and connections on social media sites, if you want to use them effectively for marketing purposes.

But there is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

1. On Facebook, click on “Home,” then at the top click on “Most Recent.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself. Similarly if someone has posted a link to an article or video that you like or agree with, click the “Like” button or post your own comment. It is easy to spend excessive time on this but you should discipline yourself and make it take no more than 5 minutes a day. When you click the “Like” button or post a comment on someone else’s content, they receive an email. It shows them that you give a hoot about them and it’s not all about you.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” Some will include a link to something they are pitching. I think whoever invented the auto direct messages on Twitter should have a special seat reserved for them in a very hot place, next to that guy who invented that sticky tape along the top of a CD jewel case. The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

Today with social media it is much easier for people to write back to a company, or to comment about it. It’s vital, especially as your company expands, to be aware of what people are saying and to respond and be engaged in conversation.

But even beyond managing your public relations, it is best to engage with others on social media sites. By showing interest in your online friends and what they are saying and in responding to their communications, it ensures they will show more interest in you.

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Landing Pages

2011-05-10T13:56:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

I was recently using some software to do research on the competitors for one of my clients, companies that are competing against my client on Google AdWords. I was amazed to find that these companies were having the visitors click through and then land on their home page.

I figured out years ago that this was not the best thing to do. But now it is considered pretty much common knowledge in pay per click advertising and in other forms of promotion such as email marketing, that you do not have the visitor land on your home page.

You create your ad on Google AdWords so that when the searcher clicks on your ad, he then lands on a customized landing page that you created just for that purpose. Or if you are doing email marketing, you put a link at the bottom of your email for people to click on, that goes not to the home page of your site but to a special landing page that you created just to go along with that email.

There are a number of reasons why it is better to make a customized landing page that your visitors will land on:

The content will match. In other words, the content of your Google AdWords ad will exactly match the content of the page they land on.

People don’t have to search for what they are looking for on your site. You want them to land on a landing page that is exactly about what they want. Your home page will usually not be about that, and so if you land them on the home page they will have to look over your navigation and figure out where to go. Many will get exasperated and leave.
If your company offers more than one product or service (most do), then most likely you will have more than one campaign on Google AdWords, each one advertising one specific product or service. Then each one of those campaigns should click through to a customized landing page that is specifically about that one product or service.

So what should and should not be on a customized landing page for pay per click or email?

It should look like your web site and have the same header at the top with your logo and all that.

It should have sales copy on it, as well as some pictures showing the product or service.

The landing page should NOT have navigation buttons on it. When I first set up pay per click campaigns for clients, this one gets the most questioning and disagreement. The whole purpose for a pay per click or email landing page is that you want the person to do something. Usually you want him to become a lead or a sale. You want him to fill out the form or call you.
I’ve been doing email marketing for about 11 years and pay per click advertising for about 6 years. I can tell you that in that time I have seen that in about 90% of the time, it works better NOT to have navigation buttons or links anywhere on the landing page. Meaning statistically you get more leads or sales (depending on what your campaign is trying to do) if you leave the navigation off.
The problem with putting navigation buttons on a landing page for pay per click or email is that the visitor will be more likely to just wander around your site, then leave. It is not enough of a tightly controlled situation. You have to control the situation better than that and that means you want to give the person one option of what to do when he is done reading that page, which is to contact you via filling out that form or calling you.

The page should have a form at the bottom for the person to fill out. Do not make the person click through to another page to fill out a form unless you can’t avoid it, like if you need for him to go to a shopping cart that is on a different site. Also include a phone number so he can call right now if he wants to. Some people argue against putting a form on the landing page, but I am always in favor of it. For one thing, this is important for people who are checking out your site on the weekend or late at night, when they can’t call you. I also think a form is better than an email link. I used to put email links on sites, but lately have been noticing that I get complaints on these because they won’t work for people who use Gmail or Yahoo, which is a lot of people today. So a form is best.

Some people think that a really long page with lots of copy is best, stuffed with lots of testimonials and all that. I’m not so sure this is the best route anymore, as people online are more and more in a hurry these days. Many times they will just read a little bit and then scroll to the bottom, skipping five feet worth of testimonials, to see “how much is the thing?!” You can test it both ways but I am generally seeing that shorter landing pages work better these days. Make your case, then give them the form.

Multimedia: I generally find that some sort of multimedia on a landing page helps conversions, i.e. the percentage of people that contact you. This can include an audio file that starts talking to them as soon as the page loads, or a video, or a Flash slide show. Statistically I find that these things help conversions, which is the name of the game.

Following these points, you will be more likely to have success with your pay per click or email campaigns.

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Multiple Use of a Single Article

2011-05-03T18:23:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

Since there are so many communication media today, it makes sense to take a single article that you write, and make sure it is utilized as much as possible and gotten out on as many communication channels as possible.

Here is my recommended plan for the use of a single article. To fit all these purposes the article should be at least 400 words.

Email Newsletter: Send the article out in your email newsletter. Some people like to put an excerpt from the article in the email, then make people click through to their web site or blog to read the rest. Or put the whole thing in the newsletter. I put the whole thing in the newsletter.

Blogs: Post the article on your blog or blogs. If your blog is not a Wordpress blog, don’t forget to go to www.pingomatic.com and send a notification to all the blog search engines. Wordpress does this automatically. I have created multiple blogs for myself and for a number of my clients, including one main blog and a number of free blogging sites. Send the article out to all.

Article Marketing: Submit the article to between 50 and 100 article directories. This builds quantity links back to your web site, and in my opinion and experience is one of the best methods of developing high quantity links in a short time. Plus people can find the articles and contact you. Supposedly the new version of Google’s algorithm discounts some article directories, but we closely monitor this and we have not seen it.

Squidoo, HubPages and Google Knol: These sites are the most important article directories and are more or less in a class by themselves. These allow you to include text links in the article (HubPages only one link, any more than that and watch out, you’re a “spammer”), plus you can include multiple photos and videos as applicable.

Twitter: Send out a tweet to your Twitter followers telling them to see your new article, then include a link to that article on your blog. Use the permalink. A permalink is a link that takes a person directly to that article on the blog. On Wordpress click on the article title and it will take you to the permalink. On Typepad, it gives a link to the permalink at the bottom of every post. Take that permalink and go to a URL shortener such as www.goo.gl, that then shortens that permalink address to a shorter address. That’s important for Twitter which only gives you 140 characters for your tweet, and because most permalinks are pretty long.

LinkedIn: Same as for Twitter. Post it to your LinkedIn profile and your connections will see it.

Facebook: Post a link to the article to your Facebook profile. At the top it says “share” and click where it says “link.” Then put the permalink there and click “attach.” Facebook will show you what it will look like, how much of an excerpt for the article they will show, and a thumbnail picture. Usually you can scroll through the pictures it finds on the page or post, and you can select the one that fits the article the best. Share it with friends.

Using these methods you will ensure maximum utilization and dissemination of your article.

(The picture above is meant to symbolize multiple ways of getting your article out, but if you choose to give it a patriotic meaning that's OK with me.)

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New Website Designed By RealWebMarketing.net for Big Trees Inc.

2011-04-26T14:06:00.001-07:00

Pacific Northwest Tree Nursery Aims to Expand Further with Updated Online Presence

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and online marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new website design for the northwest tree transplanting and nursery specialists Big Trees Inc. (http://www.bigtreesupply.com), located in Snohomish, WA.

The new website offers a comprehensive overview of the company’s services, an expanded gallery of photos of different tress offered by the company, and the latest news on what the company is doing in the area. Other features include several Flash animations, a Wordpress format, and easy access to their other online sources of information: their Facebook and Twitter pages, their online newsletter and the company’s partners in the Seattle area. RealWebMarketing.net also performed search engine optimization on the new site and is managing pay per click advertising for the company.

Ross Latham, owner of Big Trees Inc, stated, “We’re very pleased with the new site. We wanted an improved online presence for our business, a better looking, more functional web site and for people to find us more easily. So now we can continue our main focus of servicing the Seattle area with beautiful trees and know that we have bigger potential than ever.”

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net, stated, “Promoting your business is never more important than in a time of economic downturn like we’re seeing today. The key is promoting more, not cutting back. We kept in mind during the design that Big Trees Inc. really wanted to improve and expand their online presence.”

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 direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include web design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

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Comment Spam on Blogs

2011-04-26T12:53:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

If you have a blog, one thing you’re almost certain to run into these days is “comment spam.” These are comments that are posted to your blog posts that are generic in nature, meaning they could have posted that same comment on any blog in the world, and the comment is posted only so the person could also post his web site address. It is a rather cheesy form of link building. The person is trying to improve the SEO of their web site by creating a link back to it.

While I am totally in favor of link building as an important activity that raises your search engine rankings and increases traffic, I am not in favor of comment spam.

The whole idea behind blogs and especially the feature of allowing others to comment on a blog post is to start a conversation. And the etiquette of commenting on a blog is supposed to be that you post a comment if you have something of value to add to the conversation.

You can tell comment spammers because their comments tend to be things like “Love your blog,” “This is a fantastic blog, can’t believe I have found it,” or “I really agree with your article here.” While I’ll admit that these types of comments are better than “Your blog really sucks,” they are purposely generic (not related to your post) and so they don’t further the conversation in any way. You will usually not find any part of the comment that specifically mentions you blog post or the content of the blog post. And terrible spelling and grammatical errors are the norm for some reason.

Here’s what Typepad says about comment spam:

“Spam comments are unsolicited and anonymous, and often contain links or offers. TypePad AntiSpam catches most spam; however, if you do receive one, please mark it as spam immediately.”

There are software programs that facilitate this type of comment spam, i.e. help people post comments on lots of blogs.

I supervise several blogs and these types of comments have really increased lately, and I had one client email me this past week asking what to do with these comments.

First of all, I recommend setting up your blog so that you can moderate blog comments, meaning you will get an email when someone leaves a comment, and it will not appear on the blog until you log in to your blog and approve it.

Second, make a decision yourself on how you want to handle comment spam. You don’t necessarily need to delete these comments, as most of them are complimentary at least (or they are complimentary of some blog somewhere anyway).

The sheer proliferation of these types of spam comments on the blogs I am supervising has caused me to decide to delete them all. So I look for whether or not the comment is totally generic, meaning it does not mention anything in my article and the same comment could have been posted on a hundred other blogs (and probably was). With any comment that does relate to my article or does mention specific things about the article, I publish it.

There are plugins for Wordpress that assist with the handling of comment spam, but I have not checked any of them out yet.

A blog is a powerful vehicle for getting your message out and driving traffic. And it is fun to see people responding to your articles and posts, and to see how what you write has an effect on people and helps them. Comment spam, however, is an annoying thing that you just have to put up with and deal with at this point.

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Landscape Marketing

2011-04-23T12:07:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

Landscape Websites: Getting Your Web Site Re-Designed

Right now is an excellent time for landscapers to get their web site re-designed, because every landscape designer or contractor knows that the spring is the busiest time of year. So you want to have a good looking web site so that clients can find you online.

One of the most important parts of landscape websites is to have a photo gallery showing your work. Review of site statistics on numerous home improvement sites has shown that the photo galleries are usually the most highly viewed parts of the site.

Google Maps

Google Maps has radically changed the online landscape (no pun intended) for searching for local businesses.

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

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

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

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

Once you have your listing claimed for Google Maps, then the trick is to get it up to the top. There are a number of steps involved in this, but the most important is to get lots of online reviews for your business. In one of my past articles I cover a system I have created to assist with getting lots of online reviews.

Landscape Advertising: Google AdWords

You should consider using Google AdWords and putting up some campaigns, and run them at least through say July. You can run them all year long of course, but it is good to make hay while the sun shines, as they say, and the sun is shining particularly bright for landscape designers and contractors until July or so.

Google AdWords campaign have the advantage that they can be put up quickly, and since it is almost late in the spring now, it is an advantage that you can start a campaign now and have it up in a few days.

I recommend working with an experienced person who knows how to work with AdWords. I also recommend not getting involved in AdWords unless you can afford a monthly budget of at least $800. Less than that and I don’t think it will generate enough activity to make it worth it for you. But over that and you can generate a good number of leads.

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Attack of the Googleheads

2011-04-19T12:52:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

Last week I discussed a book I am reading called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. In it I discussed how I felt that the authors’ assertion that outbound marketing, or what they and others call “interruption marketing,” which includes things like display advertising, direct mail, cold calling, radio and TV ads, is broken and that the era of outbound marketing is over.

In that article last week I said that that assertion doesn’t work in practice and that you have to have a combination of both inbound marketing (search engine traffic, pay per click, blogs, social media) and outbound marketing in order to be viable.

Now in fairness I do want to say that I think the book has good stuff in it such as how to run your blog and how to put calls to action on your web pages and so on, but there is another glaring falsehood in this book which I think has gained some widespread agreement in the Internet marketing field.

This is a falsehood that is promoted by Google, and in this case the authors have taken up the baton and are promoting this falsehood.

The idea is that in order for you to gain lots of links to your web site and thereby gain good search engine rankings, you should create “remarkable content” and put it up on your site, and then wait for people to notice it and then link to it. Here’s what they say:

“Remarkable content attracts links from other web sites pointing to your web site. In other words, you want your content to prompt other content producers on the Web to ‘remark’ about your products and services and link back to your site.”

“It’s important to recognize that spending lots of time creating content on other people’s web sites with the sole purpose of getting SEO (i.e. link building) doesn’t work very well.”

“You should avoid SEO practices that rely on tricking Google and distorting search results. Here’s out rule of thumb: if a given technique is not improving the experience for a user, and it can be detected by a human doing a review, then it’s probably a bad idea.”

I’ll translate. What they are saying is that you should create really good content and put it up on your web site and/or blog, then wait for others to notice it and link to it. You should not engage in any proactive link building of any kind, such as article marketing or press releases or putting links on your blogs to your main site. This is what Matt Cutts of Google has been promoting for 4-5 years. He stresses that this creates a “natural link pattern.”

(Actually the authors do recommend one type of proactive link building, called reciprocal link building, which Google discounted the value of over two years ago. They spend a whole page on that. Book was published in 2010. Hmm.)

While this idea from Google and that the authors of this book (and quite a few other Internet marketing consultants) have adopted and promoted may sound appealing or make some sort of sense, I will explain why it is COMPLETELY FALSE and does not work in the real world (where we all live I think), and will actually hurt you and your company if you follow it.

I think that the only way this strategy would work is if:

You are already a well known company or person, or
Your company is in an industry or field or niche that contains less than 10 competitors

ALL of my clients are in competitive markets, some with hundreds or thousands of competing companies. How about you? Do you have less than 10 competitors in the whole country?

If you are in a competitive market, and you follow their advice here regarding link building, putting up remarkable content on your web site and then waiting for people to notice it, I can say with fair certainty that no one will notice it and no one or hardly anyone will link to it. Certainly not enough people to give you a competitive number of links.

I have drawn an analogy to this idea before. It is like telling a pretty girl to dress up really nice and put on makeup, then sit in her living room. Don’t go outside. Don’t use the phone. Guys will start calling you up and asking you out. Maybe they will see you through the living room window or something.

Not only have a lot of Internet marketers adopted this crazy idea, the idea has to some extent been equated with “ethics,” like it is ethical to do this and unethical to do anything else, like proactive link building. Some “experts” don’t even ever question anything Google says, as if to say that Google says it so that makes it right.

A few years ago I saw an article by someone who discussed this issue and said that you have to differentiate what is ethical from what is good for Google. I think that the reason Google has disseminated this idea is that it is good for them. It is easier for them if a few companies make it to the top, and nobody tries to mess with that by adding a lot of links through various techniques themselves. Because if people do things to add links on other web sites to their sites, it sort of upsets the apple cart and Google has to decide whether they should do something to discount that technique.

But is it good for you? Well, I have seen companies put up lots of great content, and literally nothing happened. I suppose we could discuss whether or not the content was “remarkable” enough, but I think you get the point. My point is:

You have to be proactive with link building if you want your site to have a competitive number of links, to rank well for keywords and to get traffic.

And that’s good for YOU.

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Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

2011-04-12T13:54:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

I am reading a book now called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. The authors are founders of HubSpot, makers of online marketing software.

The book has some really good stuff in it. Good advice about how to run your blog and things like that. I’m about a third of the way through.

But their second acknowledgement in the beginning is to Seth Godin, author of several books including “Permission Marketing.” I have written about him before. Let’s summarize by saying that I consider Godin’s assertion that you have to have permission from someone before you can send a marketing message to him to be nonsense, equivalent to saying “Oh pleeeeeaaaaase Mr. Prospect, would it be OK with you if I communicate?” Since I don’t consider the sending of a marketing message to someone to be offensive or bad or a crime, I don’t think we have to bend over backwards to get permission to do so.

Back to “Inbound Marketing.” The concept of the book is that we now have two types of marketing. One is called “inbound marketing,” and that is when you have someone actually reaching or looking for the type of product or service that you offer. So you put your message out there where he will see it when he starts looking. In the category of “inbound marketing” we find search engine organic (non paid) listings, pay per click advertising, blogs, and social media.

The other is “outbound marketing,” or “interruption marketing,” and this is where a marketer puts his message out there and it “interrupts” the prospect who is currently doing something else. In this category we find such things as display advertising, direct mail, radio and TV advertising, promotional emails, and even banner advertising online.

The authors write “Our conclusion was that interruption-based, outbound marketing techniques were fundamentally broken and in order to successfully break through the noise and connect to people, companies needed to rethink the way they marketed from the bottom up. In other words, they had to ensure their customers could find them using inbound marketing.”

“… The outbound marketing era is over. The next 50 years will be the era of inbound marketing.”

They go on to say that ten years ago, you could use all these various outbound marketing techniques and they worked great. But now they’re all bombing.

I agree with this assertion only up to a point. First of all, I agree that the Internet has changed the way people interact with companies. The Internet basically brought about this type of marketing which the authors call “inbound marketing.” If you can put your message in front of someone who is actively looking for your product or service right then, that’s great.

So I think inbound marketing is important and that nearly all companies should have an inbound marketing component in their marketing approach.

The problem with saying that the outbound marketing era is over, is that I don’t think that it works in actual practice. All the clients that I have use a combination of inbound marketing and outbound marketing. But if they tried to rely only on inbound marketing, I don’t think they would get enough business to be viable.

Businesses, in order to be viable today, particularly in the current economic scene, have to do everything they can to generate new leads and sales. I particularly think that with new businesses or small businesses, that you have to incorporate more “interruption” type media in order to establish yourself and survive.

Is it true that most outbound marketing methods don’t work today the way they used to? Yes, I would say so. One of the biggest challenges in marketing today is to find the type of promotional media (ads, magazines, Google AdWords, email, radio, TV, etc.) that will be productive and cost effective for a given type of business. My experience over the last five years has been that sometimes we try new things and the results are mixed.

So it is a major challenge in marketing, not only to find the right message that will motivate people, but also to find the right medium in which to communicate that message.

I believe that the best way is to utilize a combination of inbound and outbound marketing methods. Is the outbound marketing era over? No, I think that is a premature statement. Is it on the way out? Maybe. Time will tell. But for right now, I believe it is vital to utilize both.

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Statistics for Measuring Link Building and SEO

2011-04-05T10:08:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

When one is engaged on a campaign to do search engine optimization and build up links to a web site, how do you tell if you’re doing a good job?

The purpose of SEO and a link building campaign, first of all, is to create thousands of links to a web site from other web sites, so that the ranking of that site will improve on Google and other search engines. Google has stated that its main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to your site from other sites.

And we want the rankings to improve ultimately in order to increase the amount of traffic to a web site coming from search engines. So unfortunately it’s a little indirect. We build links, so we can improve search engine rankings, so we can get more traffic. And we of course want more traffic so we can get more leads or sales from the web site.

So the first thing we use to measure whether we are doing a good job is the number of links to your web site. With my major link building clients I measure this monthly. The way to do this is to go to Google and enter a string like this:

“realwebmarketing.net” -site:realwebmarketing.net

That’s your web address, in quotes, a space, a dash, a colon, and the web address again, not in quotes. Every time I talk about how to do this I get complaints that it doesn’t work. But if you do it exactly the way I explain above it will work. Make sure the dash doesn’t get turned into an em dash.

I frequently get asked “How many links do I need?” That depends on what industry you are in and how many links your competitors have. In some industries you might do really well to have 3,000 links, while in others you might need 20,000 or 30,000 or more to compete effectively.

Google makes constant changes in how they count links, so it is not unusual for the number of links to drop off dramatically occasionally. The correct action is to continue the link building campaign and the number of links will shortly come back up to where it was and continue higher.

The next step in determining the success of a link building campaign is to take your list of keywords that you are targeting, i.e. that you want to be ranking well for, and checking how well you rank for them on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I run a report on this monthly for clients, usually checking 100 or more keywords.
And no, I don’t sit there checking each keyword manually. I use software called Market Samurai for this. The final report looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Mar 11	Yahoo Mar 11	Bing Mar 11
Keyword 1	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 2	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 3	5	7	62
Keyword 4	1	1	1
Keyword 5	1	1	1
Keyword 6	6	23	24
Keyword 7	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 8	16	50	50
Keyword 9	1	8	8

Then I count up the total number of #1 positions, top 10 positions, top 20, top 100 and top 500 positions. I track these month to month. Some people wonder why I bother to check the top 100 and top 500 positions, as anything lower than say position 20 is not going to result in additional traffic. That’s true, but by tracking it this way I can see the results of the campaign, and if the number in each category is improving each month I know the campaign is going well. If you only tracked the top 20, there would be all this improvement occurring that you’d never see until those keywords arrived in the top 20 down the line.

Finally, we make sure when we start with a client that he has Google Analytics on his site and we then track the number of visitors and page views on his site month to month. And we want to see that traffic steadily increasing over time.

That’s what we look for to tell us how well the SEO and link building is working.

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Facebook Fan Pages and New Landing Pages

2011-03-22T14:04:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

Facebook has initiated some changes with fan pages, that make them more interesting and easier to use to accomplish social media marketing of your product or service.

The most interesting thing is that you can set up a separate landing page that a person will come to initially, before they have clicked “like” and become one of your fans. This uses new technology from Facebook called Facebook Markup Language, or FBML.

This initial landing page can have a large graphic in the middle of it that you or a designer can create, which is a major change from the way Facebook used to do it. You can also make parts of the graphic link to various things, such as your main web site or blog.

It used to be that whoever came to your Facebook fan page came to a “wall” which showed a feed of activity for the fan page, including things you sent out and things that fans posted.

Now you can select what people will see when they come to your fan page, before they click “like,” and after they click it. Default options include your wall, info (which shows basic text information and web site links), and photos. But using FBML, you can now make a new welcome screen that people will see before they click “like,” and you can put whatever you want there.

Here are two examples I made recently, one for RealWebMarketing.net, and one for Straight Talk Wealth Radio. Note that if you have already “liked” either of these Facebook fan pages you won’t see the initial landing page. You would have to log out of Facebook to see them. Then once you click “like” you will see something different, in both of these cases the “wall,” which shows the feed of recent activity such as things the fan page owner has posted.

Using FBML you can also create other pages, with large graphics again, pitching products you are selling or free offers you are giving away. These new pages will show up in the side or top menu. Here’s an example of one I made for RealWebMarketing.net, offering my free white papers and my book. If you give it some thought there are a wide array of possibilities for what you can do with this.

Note that one strategy you could choose would be to have the sole message of your initial fan page landing page be to push the person to click “like,” and offer them things they will get if they do so. For instance, they will get access to a free report you’ve created, if they click “like.” Then you could put access to that free report on one of the other FBML pages. So in this way you are offering an incentive for them to become one of your fans.

Getting lots of fans for your fan page, besides being an ego stroker, allows you to send them messages easily, market to them and keep in touch with them.

I’ll discuss more on strategies for getting lots of fans for your Facebook fan page in a future article.

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Twitter Marketing Strategy

2011-03-15T13:26:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

In order to effectively accomplish Twitter marketing, you have to have a lot of followers. Then you should post messages or “tweets” (I hate that word) regularly to let people know what you are doing with your business. So how do you get lots of followers?

I use a software program called Tweet Adder to accomplish this. My own personal Twitter account now has 8,103 followers currently, and I am managing several other client accounts, several of which are close to 2,000.

The basic strategy for adding lots of followers on Twitter is to follow other people, a certain percentage of whom will follow you back. Then, using the software, you identify those who didn’t follow you after several days, and “unfollow” them. Then start again by following more people. At the same time, you start putting out messages (tweets) regularly, so that other people will see your activity and follow you.

Targeting

Tweet Adder allows you to identify people who are most likely to be your prospects, and add them to a queue to be followed by you. You can search for people based on geographical location, by certain words in their bio, and by certain words in their tweets.

Let’s say you have a veterinary practice in Indianapolis. You would target people within a certain mile radius of the city, and also people who mentioned something about pets, dogs, cats, etc., in their bio or in their tweets.

Or let’s say you make software for Mac computers. You would search for anyone who mentioned “Mac” in their bios or in their tweets.

There are a variety of ways you could approach this, but the basic idea is that you can use these tools to zero in and find people who would be your most likely prospects.

Following

Once you have located people who are likely prospects and have them in a queue, you start following them, several hundred per day. Twitter has some sort of system to determine what they think is your limit of people that you can follow per day or per every couple days. They are pretty tight lipped about how they figure out this limit, but from my observation it is between 100 and 500 per day, and apparently it is higher depending on how many followers you have.

You don’t have to worry about hitting this limit because they will just tell you that you’ve reached the limit. There is no penalty or threatening email or anything.

Un-Following

I have Tweet Adder set up so that it will identify people who have not followed you back within 3 days. Then you can tell it to un-follow those people. The idea is that you are following these people in order to get them to follow you back, so if they don’t, you remove them. You can also create a “white list” of people that you want to follow regardless of whether they follow you or not, such as celebrities, big media outlets, etc.

Your Bio

Make sure your bio is really clear and brief as to what you do or what your business is. That is so that people who scrutinize the bio to see if they want to follow you back, can see easily who you are and what you do. Don’t make it cryptic or hard to understand.

Tweeting

If you are following people aggressively, a certain percentage will follow you back. It helps with this if you are putting out tweets regularly, as some people will look at what you are saying on Twitter before following you back. But this also helps in another way.

Let’s say you are regularly putting out tweets about what you are doing with your business, and those tweets contain certain popular keywords related to your business. People will search on Twitter for certain keywords, see who is writing tweets that contain those keywords, and follow them. I discovered this early on with my own account, where I would write tweets containing phrases like “pay per click advertising,” or “web design,” or “search engine optimization.” After one of those I’d get a bunch of people following me.

As a general tweeting strategy, I have found it works well to simply write tweets that talk about what you are doing with your business. For me this is “I just signed up a new pay per click ad client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a tree nursery in WA,” or “I am working on adding Twitter followers for clients.” This develops the idea in the minds of people seeing your messages that you are the guy who does ____ (whatever your business is). And I have found that this is a socially acceptable message to put on Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites, and works much better than constant messages to “buy my products!” You can occasionally tell people to buy your products but if you do it all the time, people will just block you or un-follow you.

The 2,000 Glass Ceiling

There is a particular phenomenon to be aware of on Twitter. Once you reach 2,000 people that you are following on Twitter, it will not allow you to add any more until you have over 2,000 people following you.

So you can follow this strategy of just following people and getting them to follow you, un-following those who don’t, rinse and repeat. But, in order to get your followers over 2,000, you have to use the other strategy of putting out regular tweets with keywords in them and get people to follow you that way. That’s how I got my own account over 2,000. I have two other accounts close to 2,000 now and that’s the strategy I’m using.

Good luck with your Twitter marketing.

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The Philosophy of Marketing, Email and Spam

2011-03-07T16:16:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

I have been involved in marketing since 1989, which was well before there was an Internet. I have worked for a number of companies as either a Marketing Director or VP Marketing, including three Inc. 500 companies, prior to starting my own business.

Early in my career, I worked for a man who had made it a company policy, that whenever the company acquired a prospect name, they would keep it on their prospect list and continue to mail and promote to the person until 1) he died, 2) he asked to be off the mailing list, or 3) he bought something.

I always thought this was a sensible policy and philosophy and have tried to follow it throughout my professional career in marketing. I have observed that in order to be successful in marketing, you have to be aggressive.

Even in the early days, before the Internet, when we were doing direct mail and a variety of display advertising, there was usually a tiny percentage of people that would react back at the marketing message with an angry or nasty response. Like asking to be off the mailing list in a really nasty manner or similar types of communications.

Well of course we would always take the person off the list if he asked to be off. But I realized a couple of things back then: a) it was always a tiny percentage of people that complained, and b) I couldn’t let that negative communication cause me to back off of aggressively marketing to the remainder. So I would handle the ask-offs but I would ignore the intent of the communications.

Now flash forward to the beginning of email marketing, in 2000-2001. I worked for a software company, and we started doing a lot of email marketing. It happened that all of the email that we sent in those days was to people who had opted in. But we would still get occasional, nuclear complaints from some person who accused us of spamming, wrote to our hosting company, even wrote to the Federal Trade Commission. In each case we could show that the person had opted in on X date.

Around that same time I discovered that our company had been put on a couple of email “blacklists.” These are lists that are compiled by some private person, based on some person accusing someone of being a “spammer.” These blacklist compilers are not part of any official or government agency of any kind. Then certain ISPs like Earthlink or AOL would subscribe to these blacklists, and block any emails going to their subscribers from the supposedly offending parties.

I discovered that anyone can accuse anyone of being a “spammer” and the supposed offender would be put on the blacklist. The person or company put on the list would not be notified in any way, and you had to contact the company and provide proof that you were not a “spammer,” and they would remove you – if they felt like it.

I began to refer to these people as “privacy Nazis.”

A few years later certain people abused the medium of email and sent out millions of emails, promoting sexual enhancement products, toner cartridges, and other products. They used deceptive practices and usually would not remove you from their lists. All this brought about the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires that you do not use deceptive practices, provide an opt-out method and remove people within 10 days if they ask, and include your physical street address in the email.

The CAN-SPAM Act does not make it illegal to send out unsolicited commercial email.

Yet despite this, it has somehow developed as an accepted idea in the world of the Internet and even in the society that sending unsolicited commercial email is called “spam” and is evil and wrong. Author Seth Godin has even written a book legitimizing this idea and saying that you have to always get permission from someone before you can send them email.

I have often wondered where this idea came from and how it became institutionalized in the society, because I believe it is inherently wrong. Certainly the medium of email was abused in the early to mid 2000s. And, having spent seven of my years in the marketing field promoting to IT professionals, I have observed that there is a distinct animosity in the IT field toward marketing of any kind. I believe this idea has spread into the Internet as a whole and has colored the attitude towards email in society.

I recently had an interesting experience which brought this whole issue to the forefront for me. I had some problems with my hosting company and decided to change. I switched to a new company, one of the major ones, and foolishly did not find out first what their policies were on email. Because I am aggressive in marketing my own business and send out a fair amount of email every week, and although everything I do is completely legal according to the CAN-SPAM Act, not all of the emails I send are to opt-in lists (gasp, horror, OMG!)

I found out my new hosting company had a policy that I could not send more than 200 emails per day, which was just a tad below my quota. I called them and tried to find a solution, but no go. I checked on another hosting company that one of my clients uses, and found that although they would allow you to send several thousand per day, they had a “zero tolerance” policy towards “unsolicited commercial email.” I ended up switching back to my original hosting company, which had had some service issues, but at least they allowed me to send out the number of emails that I have become accustomed to.

So this brings me back to why I started writing this article in the first place. You have to be aggressive in marketing in order to be successful. You can’t be timid or afraid of the prospect or have an attitude like “Please Mr. Prospect is it OK if I communicate?”

And I have always believed that marketing is a positive thing in society. It lets people know about products or services that they need or that will help them. It helps companies to be profitable and successful, which is what creates jobs and allows people to earn paychecks (not government stimulus programs).

I have seen companies drop their marketing, or become careful or timid or backed off in their marketing. In every case I have seen the company go into a period of decline, come out of it smaller or less powerful, or go out of business completely.

So I have to disagree with Mr. Godin and the privacy Nazis and anyone else who thinks that a marketer should be careful or timid or backed-off. And although I will always obey the laws, if someone tries to tell me I can’t send out email, I will try to find a way around it. I think my old boss would approve.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Marketing With Article Directories

2011-03-01T13:01:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

An article directory, also called a content hub, is a type of web site that has lots of informational articles on it. A person with a web site, who needs article content for their site, can go to an article directory and download articles for free on a wide variety of topics, and then post them on their own web site. These article directories allow you to search by topic or category or by keyword.

Writers can post articles on the content hubs. The benefit for the writer is that he can mention his company and include his web site address in the article. And that provides in-bound links to his web site, from the content hubs themselves, and from every web site where that article is posted. In-bound links, meaning links from other web sites that link to yours, increase link popularity, which is the main criteria used by Google and other search engines to determine web site ranking.

So the article directories service both writers who want to get the word out on their company or products or services, and people who have web sites who need article content.

The key, for a writer, is to write something that will appeal to the general public, or at least to a sizable specific niche public, so that the article gets downloaded and used on lots of sites in need of content.

It is also key to include the name of the company, and links to the company web address in the writer bio at the end. Most article directories will allow you to include up to three links in the bio box. But most will not allow you to put links into the content of the article.

The article itself should not be written in such a way that it is just a blatant promo piece for your company. It has to be written so that it is about a topic that your company deals with or you are an expert on, and it mentions your company, but it doesn't say "call us now at 1-800-222-2222 for a great deal on tires" at the end. In other words, what in marketing is called a "call to action," where you tell your prospect to contact you or to respond for more information or to buy now, should not be included in articles for article directories.

If you have a list of keywords that you are targeting, where you are trying to rank well for those keywords, then find a way to include those words or phrases in your article, preferably near the beginning of the article.

It's a good idea to look over the type of articles that are currently being accepted on article directories, to get a better idea of what works there, and so you can write articles that will fit this medium. Some good article directories to look at are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are currently over 700 article directories on the Internet.

Most of the article directories require that you register with them before they will allow you to post an article there. Some of the sites have your article reviewed by a live person before it goes up. Some will just post it without review.

Once you get registered on a number of article directories, it is best to post one article, then post more articles at intervals of about once a week. Make sure you include your company name and URL in the bio box.

If your company has any articles written already that were written for other purposes, you may be able to convert them into a form that will work for the article directories. The key is to read the types of articles that are already appearing on the hubs and convert your content into a similar form. Also, many article directories will reject articles of less than 400 words, so make sure they are at least that long.

I have been submitting client articles to article directories for about four years, and have found this to be an excellent way of building up the number of links to the client’s web site. I have built up the number of links to a client’s site from near zero to over 2,000 in 2-3 months. But I recommend doing this for 6-12 months at least.

I have observed that some search engine optimization (SEO) companies seem to look down on article directories or not consider it a valid form of link building. I have never been able to figure out why this is, since I have been doing it and seeing very valid, positive results for 4 years now.

Article directories are a great way to get out information on your company, and promoting on the net.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Tracking Where Responses Come From - "Sourcing" Responses

2011-02-22T12:33:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

One of the most important actions in measuring the effectiveness of any piece of promo is "sourcing" the responses that come in from it. In this case "sourcing" means "to accurately determine with each response that comes in, what prompted or influenced that person to contact you."

Whenever you promote your business or activity, through pay per click advertising, press releases, article marketing, a mail piece, advertisement, trade show, or article, you are testing different messages and media. You want to be able to measure how well that promotional action did in terms of interesting people and getting them to buy your product or service.

On the other hand it is also important to realize that with any promotion you do, particularly if you are doing multiple promotional actions, each piece has a direct and indirect effect that it creates in the prospect's mind. He sees an ad and remembers it, but he may not respond until he later gets an email or sees something on Google. Display advertising particularly has a lot of indirect impact on responses.

But, even though we know that each piece has an indirect effect that we don't see, the direct response that a piece generates IS an important gauge, particularly when compared to other pieces, in telling you how the piece is doing in terms of creating want and selling your product.

DIFFERENT SOURCING METHODS

Effective sourcing means that with every reach from a prospective customer, you must determine what got them to reach for your services. This can be done two ways. One way is to ask every person who responds what prompted them to call you. This has to be done religiously (i.e. every time) in order to get usable information.

An easier way is to include a code number on every piece of promotion. A common way is to put an extension number after your phone number, i.e. (818) 951-8800, ext. 2598. Then when the person calls asking for extension 2598, you know which promo piece he is responding to. On pieces where you include a coupon or business reply card, include the code somewhere on the coupon or card as well.

It's a good idea to assign a separate code each time you use a promo piece, if you are using it more than once. Let's say you designed promo piece X, and you sent it out to the ABC list (rented from a trade magazine). You assign it a code of 2005. And from that mailing you got 55 responses.

Now 6 weeks later you want to send out promo piece X again, but this time to the XYZ list (rented from a mailing list house). Don't use the same code (2005) again. Why? Because if you assign it a separate code (2006) you now have a chance to measure how well the ABC list did compared to the XYZ list. Direct mail texts will tell you that the list can be responsible for up to 60% of the success or failure of a mailing, so it's important to measure that.

The same is true of advertising. Let's say you design ad A, and place it in Software of the Future magazine, with code 1035. It gets 40 responses. Then you take the same ad and run it in Software Just for Fun magazine, with code 1036. This time it gets 85 responses. Now you have a clear picture not only of how well your ad did, but also how well these magazines did.

RECORDING THE SOURCING DATA

In order to get accurate sourcing data, you have to organize your communication lines so that every response coming in gets recorded somehow. This could be done by your receptionist, especially if she handles the mail too. She could record every phone and mail response in a "responses log" on paper or in a spreadsheet, or even better, in a database like GoldMine. The log should contain the person's name, company name, phone number, and what prompted them to contact you. If you have numerous people answering the phone or taking calls, each one of them must record the responses and the source on a log.

A log is one way to keep track of what got people to reach. Then later when a sale is made, you enter that information into that person's record as well, with the dollar amount of the sale. With a good database, you can later run reports telling you how many responses came in to each promo piece, and how much each piece made in sales. I've done it both ways (with a log, and with a database) and I can tell you, setting up a good database will save you HOURS of time whenever you need to do an analysis of the data.

CUSTOMER REACHES

Some people make the mistake of assuming that when a customer calls up about buying more of your product or service, that he is just calling because he was happy with your product or service last time.

This is actually true in a few cases. More often, however, your company is sending out a lot of communication that the customer sees. This is either communication specifically directed at the customer, such as an email targeting the customer or a newsletter or company magazine; or the company is placing advertisements that are being seen by customers and non-customers alike.

In cases where the company is sending out multiple communications on multiple communication lines, it becomes unlikely that the customers are just calling out of the blue strictly on their own origination. Something is at least reminding them of you and prompting them to call. And you want to know what that is, because that tells you what to strengthen. It's wise to pull the string a little bit when the person calls, asking if he is calling off a promo piece, then asking if something reminded him of the company recently, did he get the email?, etc. This will usually get the real answer.

And why is that so important? Because as a company grows, more and more of its business becomes repeat business, and the promotional actions you do to get your customers to call up again and buy more, are some of the most valuable actions you can do.

Developing brand new customers is much more expensive in terms of marketing dollars spent, than getting your existing customers to buy again. So repeat sales from your customers are much more viable. Knowing which of your customer promo actions are working is golden information, allowing you to reinforce those actions.

In summary, sourcing reaches from prospects and customers alike is a vital action, allowing you to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing actions, and allowing you to eliminate guesswork and invest in the promo that will get you the best responses and sales.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

The 8 Secrets to Making Your Web Site PRODUCE!

2011-02-16T16:59:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

Many web sites today are not viable, meaning they are not doing what they are supposed to - i.e. producing leads and/or sales. Now I'll qualify that statement by saying that I'm talking about web sites that are for a commercial purpose. Those sites should be producing leads and/or sales for the business, and it is possible. But in order to do it, you have to drive traffic to the site.

There are certain key actions to driving traffic to your site and getting it producing leads and/or sales.

What's Working Now

In the Internet's short history, the website marketing actions that have been truly effective have changed just about each year. These are the actions that are working right now, and these are the actions you should take as part of a campaign to make your site successful:

a. Pay Per Click Advertising
b. Blogging
c. Press releases
d. Google Maps
e. Content Hub Submissions
f. Collecting Identities on Your Web Site
g. Making sure your site is set up to take advantage of traffic
h. Email Marketing to Your Own Lists
i. Search Engine Optimization

I will explain each action.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising

The term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

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

One of the biggest advantages to this type of advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with one of these search engines, put some money in it, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This is has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With paid search engine advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

The main pay per click providers right now are Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center.

b. Blogging

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to a web site. You set up a blog, either in a sub-directory on your main site (www.yourwebsite.com/blog) or on a separate web address (www.yourblog.com). Then you set up links to your main web site in the sidebars, and also put links to your main web site in the text of your blog posts.

Whenever you post something to the blog, make sure you send out a notification, called a “ping,” to the blog search engines. Wordpress blogs can be set up to do this automatically. For other types of blogs go to www.pingomatic.com.

c. Press releases

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

By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.
It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and to continue doing this over a several month period. But if you can’t do this every week, once or twice a month is still very helpful.

d. Google Maps

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

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

e. Content Hub Submissions

A content hub, also called an article directory, is a type of web site that has lots of informational articles on it. A person with a web site, who needs article content for their site, can go to a content hub and download articles for free on a wide variety of topics, and then post them on their web site. These content hubs allow you to search by topic or category or by keyword.

Writers can post articles on the content hubs. The benefit for the writer is that he can mention his company and include his web site address in the article. And that provides in-bound links to his web site, from the content hubs themselves, and from every web site where that article is posted. In-bound links, meaning links from other web sites that link to yours, increase link popularity, which is one of the main criteria used by Google and other search engines to determine web site ranking.

So the content hubs service both writers who want to get the word out on their company or products or services, and people who have web sites who need article content.

Content hubs have been and continue to be a great way to build links to your web site.

f. Collecting Identities on a Web Site

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

The solution is to include reasons on your site for the person who is interested, but not going to buy right away, to give you his name and email address now. This allows you to build an email list, which over time, can become a formidable part of your marketing strategy. Free offers of various types, usually of information, are the best way to do this.

g. Making Sure Your Site is Set Up to Take Advantage of Traffic

Once you finally get people coming to your site, you have to have the site set up in order to properly take advantage of the traffic. Aside from having free offers, this includes:

1. Having well written and compelling sales text
2. Having photos of your product readily visible, especially if the product is unusual in some way
3. Provide a "BUY" button, large and easy to find on every page
4. Make sure the buying process is easy and intuitive

I have seen mistakes on web sites, with omissions on all of the points mentioned above. Any one of those mistakes can kill your sales, and missing out on all four is certain death.

h. Email Marketing to Your Own Lists

Once you have built up an email list, the thing to do is to start marketing to that list with email, either with individual offers for products or services, or with newsletters that contain information articles as well as information on your products or services.

8-10 years ago, emailing to rented email lists was a great way to find brand new customers. Unfortunately, certain unscrupulous people overdid it, emailing to email lists endlessly, and ignoring accepted ethical practices that eventually became law in the Federal CAN-SPAM Act. As a result most people are very skeptical of promotional email unless they have "opted in" to some list.

So that's the key. Once you have gotten someone to opt-in to your list, they have given you the OK to send them newsletters or other material. This now gives you the opportunity to give that person more familiarity with you and your company and product.

For years marketing experts have said that it takes multiple exposures to you or communications from you to get someone to buy. In other words, someone is not as likely to buy from you the first time they hear of you. It takes repeated exposures, to email to them on a regular basis.

i. Search Engine Optimization

It's important to have your web site set up in order to get the best possible rankings from search engines. There are a lot of factors involved and let's just say that unless you have a LOT of free time on your hands, it is best to have a professional handle this for you.

Summary

Once again, the most important actions to take in order to get your web site producing, are:

And there is one more factor, maybe even more important than the rest – which is to do these actions regularly, month after month.

Submitting one article to a couple of content hubs isn't going to accomplish very much. But if you submit a new article twice a month, to the top 100 hubs, for several months, you're really going to see results. The same goes for paid search engine advertising, blogging, press releases, and emailing to your opt-in lists.

The key is doing them on a regular basis and keeping it up for several months. Then you will start seeing some real results.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Blogging Basics

2011-02-08T12:42:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

So you want to start a blog? Where do you go and how do you do it?

First of all you have to decide whether you want to do this as a professional business or if it’s just a hobby. That will determine how you set it up.

Free Blogging Sites

If you want to start a blog as a hobby and it’s not something where you want to sell products or services as a professional business, you can start a blog at one of the five free blogging sites:

www.wordpress.com
www.blogger.com
www.posterous.com
www.livejournal.com
www.blog.com

Each one of these sites will allow you to start a free account and put up a blog, and to customize it to some degree. Each site has a selection of “themes,” i.e. stock designs that you can choose for your blog. If you really dig into the interface you can also customize the items that appear in your sidebar. In some cases you can customize the header graphic at the top.

All of these free blogging sites will set up your blog address so it has their name in it, i.e. http://yourblog.wordpress.com, or http://yourblog.blogspot.com.

Of the five free blogging sites I like www.Wordpress.com the best, because it is built on the Wordpress architecture and gives you the most options.

Wordpress and Typepad

If you want to start a blog for a professional business, then I recommend that you use either Wordpress or Typepad to set up the blog, as these are both professional blogging platforms.

Setting up a blog with Wordpress is different from setting up a free blog at www.wordpress.com. You have to have a hosting account, or you can set up a blog in a sub-directory on an existing site. Doing it this way will give you quite a bit more customization options. You can set it up via your hosting company (on their web site or calling them), or you can download the files from www.wordpress.org (not .com), and upload them to your site. Doing it via your hosting company tends to be much faster. And of course doing it this way with Wordpress allows you to choose your own site address.

You can either pick an existing Wordpress theme and then customize it, or you can have the blog customized by a Wordpress expert so that it looks just like your existing web site. Or you can have a brand new design done by a web designer and then have that converted into a Wordpress theme. Using an existing Wordpress theme is the less expensive way to go. Having a design converted into a Wordpress theme will add significant cost.

Setting up a Wordpress blog has many advantages, such as the fact that the Wordpress system has quite a few plugins that can give you added features or functionality to your site, such as search features, nice looking photo galleries, connection with Facebook or Twitter, or search engine optimization functions.

Typepad is another very professional blogging system. You pay a monthly fee (either $9 or $15 depending on what service you choose). The $15 per month option allows you to have unlimited blogs, and you don’t have to also pay a hosting fee. The default is that the blog address will have Typepad’s name in it (http://yourblog.typepad.com) but you can register a URL and set it so that that URL goes to your blog (http://www.yourblog.com).

Typepad has quite a few themes you can choose from, and it is relatively easy to customize your graphic header at the top and your sidebars, and put in pictures of yourself or products you sell or whatever. Typepad also has a good selection of plugins to add special functionality.

Summary

I think it is a good idea to decide BEFORE you start on whether your blog is going to be a pro thing where you will be selling something, or just a hobby blog.

If it will be a pro thing, it is better to select Wordpress or Typepad in the beginning, and set up your own custom URL. The reason is that having a web address with “wordpress” or “blogspot” in the address, sort of indicates that it is not a professional thing. It makes it look sort of amateurish. Not that a lot of companies don’t do it. They do, but I think it looks cheesy.

And I have seen some people start a blog on Blogger for instance, and then build up lots of traffic and fans for it, and then they are stuck with being on Blogger. Because to move the blog would for the most part result in having to start over with traffic building.

Good luck with your blogging.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Keyword Research Today in 2011

2011-02-01T14:43:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

Keyword research is a vital part of search engine optimization, and is the first step of SEO.

The overall concept for keyword research is that you want to find keywords that have a good amount of traffic (i.e. people are searching on search engines for those keywords) but do not have a ton of competition.

With SEO, the amount of competition is key, because if you try to rank for a keyword that has very high amounts of sites competing for it, you just won’t be able to rank, period. So you have to find and select keywords that have good traffic and not high competition. And sometimes you might have to abandon some keywords that you thought were “the ones” for your market. I note that this is very hard for clients sometimes.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, because of competition, usually in the millions, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Compiling Your List

Here is how to compile your list.

1. Make up a list of at least 20-30 potential keywords, by trying to think of what phrases people would type in to find your product or service. Put these phrases into a spreadsheet, one keyword per row.

2. Go to one or two competitor websites. Select View | Source and see if they have a group of keywords in the HTML code near the top (not everyone does but many will). Select any that are appropriate for your business and add them to your list.

3. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and paste your list of keywords into the tool. It will then come up with additional suggestions, many of which are very good. Paste them into your spreadsheet, but go through the list carefully and delete any that are not appropriate for your business.

You should now have a pretty good sized list, anywhere from 100 to 300 keywords.

Researching the Keywords

Now we have to find out the amount of traffic and the number of competing sites for each keyword. There are several good tools to do this, none of which are free. Google’s keyword tool shows traffic and then gives you a percentage which supposedly gives you an idea of the number of competing sites, but I don’t find this very helpful.

Over the years I have used a number of tools for this research, including Wordtracker, which is a paid monthly online service ($45 per month I think) and Keyword Discovery ($75 per month). I found Wordtracker to be kludgy and confusing although some people swear by it. Keyword Discovery is easier to use but more expensive.

Then a couple years ago I discovered Market Samurai, a desktop based software product that you only have to buy once. I tested it, then bought it and have been using it ever since. This product also has some other very useful features, including determining how high you rank on Google, Yahoo and MSN for your entire list of keywords, which is a report I run monthly for some of my clients.

Through Market Samurai you can find out how many people are searching for each keyword, and the number of competing sites.

I sort the list according to the number of competing sites, from low to high. I then go through the list and highlight the ones that have more than a certain amount of traffic.

Next I take the highlighted ones and place them into several groups, based on how many competing sites they have. This gives us groups that are graded according to desirability for use in search engine optimization. I won’t give you my number criteria because I can’t give away all my secrets.

Use of Your Keywords

Now that you have your list of keywords that are most desirable and useful for SEO purposes, what do you do with them?

1. On-Page Optimization: This term refers to putting the keywords into appropriate places on the pages of your web site. This includes meta-titles and descriptions. These are the titles and descriptions that appear on Google (title underlined in blue) when the listing for your page comes up. You can also create a meta keyword block, though some people argue that this is not relevant any more. You can also put the keywords into your headlines on the page, using the H1 and H2 tags, and you can put them into the “alt tags,” which you see when you mouse over an image on a page.

2. Off-Page Optimization: Off-page optimization refers to creating links to your site from other sites on the web. Google says that the number of links to your site is the most important criteria in how high they will rank your site. So the trick is to build up lots of links to your site. The most valuable link, so say some SEO gurus, is an “anchor text” link, which means a keyword of some kind that is linked to your site. Now that you have a list of the best keywords to use, you should use those keywords in your blog posts, press releases and articles, and link them to your site when you can. All of these actions are geared towards getting your site to rank well for those keywords and raise them up onto the first page of search results for those keywords. That gets you traffic from search engines.

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

Good luck with your keyword finding efforts.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Does Your Business Have a Unique Selling Proposition?

2011-01-25T10:31:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

In marketing, whether with website marketing or offline marketing, it is important to develop what is called a “unique selling proposition,” or USP, for your business. This is defined as a way of presenting or selling your business that makes it unique or makes it stand out from the competition.

Decades ago, marketers discovered that as more and more competing companies came into the marketplace, that it did not work well to try to be all things to all people. If every company did this, then how could the customer decide which one to choose?

Marketers discovered that it worked better to find a way to differentiate themselves, to say that their company was unique in some way, to put themselves into a certain niche.

You see this a lot with big companies today. Car manufacturers have nearly all defined themselves as manufacturing a certain type of car, i.e. luxury cars, rugged cars or trucks, economy cars, etc. BMW is “the ultimate driving machine.” Audi is “progressive luxury.” Lexus is the “pursuit of excellence.” The VW Jetta is an inexpensive car with lots of safety innovations. The Ford F150 is the best selling truck in America for X number of years.

Beer companies have been using USPs for a long time. Coors is brewed with Rocky Mountain water. The Bud Light Playbook positions them as the beer you drink while you’re watching football. Heineken is the premium imported beer. Corona is apparently the beer you drink while on the beach, with a twist of lime of course.

We’ve all seen these examples and I’m sure you can think of many more. But what about your small or medium sized business? Does it have a unique selling proposition? Do you have a way of making your business stand out from the crowd? Or does your business fade into the landscape?

The more competition there is in your type of business, the more vital it is to develop a USP. I’ve worked with a few dentists over the years and there is an awesome amount of competition among dentists. And the problem is that most dentists do not develop any kind of USP. They are the “friendly, caring” dentist. But so are the other 45 dentists advertising in their small city. So with a dental practice it is important to develop some kind of USP. With a practice based just on referrals, it doesn’t matter as much. But as soon as you start to advertise, you have to find a way to stand out, to make your advertising effective.

Real estate is another area where there is a ton of competition and where most agents or brokers have no USP.

With home improvement companies, I think it is easier to develop a USP because most home improvement companies tend to specialize in one or more aspects of their particular trade. You have the company that does copper repiping, or the company that specializes in home foundation repair, or the company that is expert in chimney repair and cleaning. Or among landscape companies, you have one that does high end design, another that does installation and maintenance, or another that works mainly with commercial properties.

However you do it, to the degree that you separate your company out from the competition, you will be more successful.

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Getting the Most Out of Your Web Site

2011-01-12T14:13:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

The point of a web site and website marketing is that it is an online place where people can easily find out about your organization, but in most cases the goal is for people to respond. We want them to respond and give us their name and contact information, so we can contact them and sell them something, or at least send them repeated communications about our company (and sell them something later on down the road).

So how can we maximize the number of people that respond to our web site? Here are some tips you can use to increase response.

Navigation

You have to make sure your site navigation is set up so visitors can find their way around easily. Most site navigation is set up across the top or in the left hand column.

Over the past couple years it has become more and more common to have a fairly limited number of navigation buttons, with many of them having dropdown menus that pop up when you move the mouse over them. So your main navigation buttons define the categories or sections, and the dropdowns are the choices within those categories. This idea allows you to have one all-inclusive navigational structure that can go on all your pages, so you can find your way to any page from any other page in the site.

Make it Easy for People to Respond

You need to make it as easy as possible for people to respond to you, and to give them multiple ways of doing so.

I was talking to someone last week who only has phone numbers on his site. I think it is much better to include phone numbers, as well as clickable emails, and a form for people to fill out. One of the types of publics that you have to accommodate with your site is people who will search at night (even late at night) or on the weekends. They are much more inclined to fill out a form at those off hours than call. In general the more response options you give, the more responses you will get.

I recommend putting the phone number and possibly the address on the top masthead, or on the sidebar, so it is visible from every page of the site.

Google Analytics

It is vital to be able to see how many people are coming to your site per week or per month. You wouldn’t believe how many people I talk to who have no idea how many people are visiting their site.

The handling is much different if a web site has a ton of visitors but hardly any responses, compared to a site with hardly any traffic. If you don’t have some good web statistics program set up, those two sites will look the same to you.

Google Analytics is a free service, that allows you to see how many people are visiting, what pages they are visiting, what other sites are referring visitors to you, and what keywords they are typing in on search engines to find you. You have to set up an Analytics account, then put some invisible code on each page. Once that’s done you can really see what’s going on.

Offers

Many people think of an offer as “call us now for more information” or “call us now to talk to one of our salesmen.”

The problem with using only this approach is that there are plenty of people visiting your web site who are possible prospects down the road, but are not ready to buy right now for whatever reason. So they’re not going to respond to an offer like that.

If you can get them to respond and get onto your email mailing list, you can communicate to them regularly in a sort of captive audience type of way. You can educate them about your products or services, and more importantly, you can place your company into their mind so they think of YOU when they are ready to buy. This is called “top of mind awareness.”

You are definitely expending resources, either time or money or both, to get someone to your site. So placing items on your site that will entice people to respond and put themselves on your mailing list is very important. But this is getting harder and harder these days because people are deluged with email. So you have to give them a good reason to add one more email to their inbox.

An email newsletter is a great choice, but of course you have to be prepared to create that newsletter and create quality content for it on an ongoing basis. I write mine and send it out once a week, but monthly or twice a month are fine.

Another great way to get people to respond is with information products such as “free reports” or “white papers.” These are written about topics related to your products or services so that everyone who requests it would theoretically be a prospect. Then you set it up so that the visitor has to give you his name and contact info in order to get it. I have used this technique very successfully over the years at a variety of companies.

You can offer a free online course, where the person gives you his name and email and then receives a series of emails with the information (via an autoresponder). It’s like a free report or white paper, but in a different format.

You can also create videos with information that would be useful to your prospects, and then require that people give you their name and email in order to access the videos.

The whole point of these offers is to get the people who are not necessarily ready to buy right now to respond to you and get onto your mailing list. Then to send them regular newsletters and/or sales information.

Hopefully these tips will help you get the most out of your web site.

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Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions for 2011

2011-01-04T17:25:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

Now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions on how to improve your Internet marketing in 2011. Here are my suggestions for you.

Posting to the Blog: I resolve to post new content to my blog at least once a week in 2011, realizing that search engines give more weight or importance to blogs specifically because they usually have fresh content added regularly. I realize that the post doesn’t have to be a full blown article but can be just a comment and link to some other content on the web, or posting a video of interest from YouTube.

Pinging: I resolve to also, always and every single time I post something to my blog, to send a notification, called a ping, to the blog search engines. I realize that although I am witty and brilliant, my wit and brilliance alone will not drive people to my blog unless they can find me in the search engines. The pinging is what drives people to my blog. If my blog uses the Wordpress system, I resolve to ensure that it is configured to automatically send a ping to the blog search engines. Otherwise I resolve to use www.pingomatic.com after every single blog post. Did I mention to do this every time I post?

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. I know that submitting articles to article directories and press releases to online PR sites are two excellent ways to do this.

SEO and Keyword Research: I resolve to get keyword research done in 2011, since I know that I should be targeting keywords that have high traffic, but a low number of competing sites. I know that with keywords with 15 billion competing sites, I won’t be able to rank for them at all. Further, if my site has not had search engine optimization in the last two years, I resolve to get it optimized in 2011.

Web Statistics: I resolve to ensure my site has some sort of good web statistics program, 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.

Google Maps: I resolve to get my business, if it is a local business, onto Google Maps, which will get me onto page one of Google. I, unlike many people, know that just because I have a Google AdWords or Google Analytics account does NOT mean I have a listing on Google Maps.

Web Design: I resolve to ensure that my web site looks modern and up to date, not like it was designed during the reign of Henry the VIII.

Social Media: I resolve to use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter more often in 2011 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 2011.

Leads/Sales: I resolve to get my web site really producing leads and/or sales in 2011, so that the site is a real contributing force towards the success of my business and not just a source of frustration and embarrassment.

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 2011 will be the best year ever for you.

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Internet Marketing On Into the New Decade

2010-12-29T14:20:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pay Per Click Advertising – an Introduction

2010-12-21T12:57:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Started

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

Determining Your Best Search Terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bids and Bidding

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

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

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

Budgets

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

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

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

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

Writing Your Ad

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

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

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

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

Your Landing Page

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

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

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

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

Geo-Targeting

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

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In our experience:

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

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

Summary

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

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Building Quality Links with Online PR in 2011

2010-12-14T13:16:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimized Press Releases

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

Blogs: How They Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Put the article up onto your blog.

5. Ping the blog search engines.

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

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Tracking the Success of Your Web Site 2011

2010-12-07T12:08:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

Following Your Statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pay Per Click Conversions

2010-11-30T12:58:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Capturing Identities on a Web Site in 2010 and Beyond

2010-11-23T14:33:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

The Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Marketing Strategy Once You Start Collecting a List

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with the establishment of your email list.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Growing Your Business Using the Internet

2010-11-16T12:26:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

Google Maps

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

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

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

Pay Per Click Advertising

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

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

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

Blogging

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

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

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

SEO and Link Building

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with your online growth strategies.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Promoting Your Blog

2010-11-09T12:30:00.001-08:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Using Facebook to Promote a Business

2010-11-02T14:29:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

What to Communicate on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

A Three-Pronged Approach to Link Building

2010-10-26T13:27:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

Article Directories

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

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

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

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

Online PR

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

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

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

Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Google Maps

2010-10-12T13:09:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

My recommendation for local businesses is:

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

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

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

2010-10-05T12:48:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

The Full Social

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

First Tier Sites

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

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

Second Tier Sites

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

YouTube

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

Squidoo And HubPages

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

Business Directories

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

Blogging

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

Social Bookmarking Sites

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

Summary

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

No Longer Recommend Tumblr.com

2010-09-28T14:02:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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Google AdWords Quality Score

2010-09-28T13:53:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

Here’s what Google says about the quality score:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with your Google AdWords campaigns.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Online Reviews

2010-09-20T22:01:00.001-07:00

by John Eberhard

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

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

Cautionary Tales

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

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

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

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

Taking Control

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

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

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

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

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

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

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