Building Quality Links with Online PR in 2011

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Optimized Press Releases

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

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

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

Blogs: How They Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Put the article up onto your blog.

5. Ping the blog search engines.

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

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Tracking the Success of Your Web Site 2011

by John Eberhard

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

Following Your Statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pay Per Click Conversions

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Capturing Identities on a Web Site in 2010 and Beyond

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

 The Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Marketing Strategy Once You Start Collecting a List

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with the establishment of your email list.

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Growing Your Business Using the Internet

by John Eberhard

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

Google Maps

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

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

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

Pay Per Click Advertising

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

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

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

Blogging

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

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

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

SEO and Link Building

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with your online growth strategies.

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Promoting Your Blog

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Using Facebook to Promote a Business

by John Eberhard

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

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

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

What to Communicate on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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