The 8 Secrets to Making Your Web Site PRODUCE!

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.

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

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

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:

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

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

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.

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Keyword Research Today in 2011

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.

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Does Your Business Have a Unique Selling Proposition?

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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More on Content Management Systems (CMS)

by John Eberhard

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system that allows you to log in online, and through an online interface, make changes to your web site.

I have observed that over the last year this concept has become more and more popular with companies, and many of the people I talk to about having a web site designed or re-designed want it done with a CMS. They want to be able to make changes to the web site themselves, without depending on a designer who is often busy.

When clients want a CMS, I typically put their site into Wordpress, which is a blogging program but is also very workable as a CMS and has become quite popular in the last two years for this purpose. I like Wordpress because by and large it is pretty easy for people to learn and use.

I spoke to a fellow designer recently about CMSes, and we agreed that many people seem to have a misconception about what they will be able to do with a CMS. So I thought it would be good to talk about what you can and can’t do with a CMS, or more precisely, what level of knowledge and expertise you would need in order to do certain things with a CMS.

Here are things you can do with a CMS like Wordpress, with limited or no knowledge of HTML:

1. Edit text on the site

2. Add new pages

3. Add pictures

4. Add a video from YouTube

5. Add posts to your blog if you have one

Here’s what you can’t do with a CMS unless you have an intimate knowledge of web design and the use of programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver:

a. Change the masthead graphic

b. Change the number of columns on the page

c. Change the colors of the background

d. Change the content of your sidebars (you might be able to change some content)

Pictures

To make pictures appear correctly and ensure that they are the right size, you will need some sort of program to edit and resize your pictures. Most digital cameras today give you pictures that are huge by the web’s standard, between 8 and 12 megapixels. If you uploaded and tried to place a picture of this size on a web page it would cover the entire page and then some.

So you will need to be able to resize photos and set them at the size you want, at 72 dots per inch (DPI). Usually you want to have photos between 4 and 7 inches wide on a web page. Any wider and you will cover your entire page and any less and the picture will look too tiny.

Even if you successfully resize your photos, you may get some undesirable situations, such as where the text next to the photos is right up against the photos with no space in between. A web designer can fix such things but he would do so using HTML code.

Galleries

Wordpress has some really good photo galleries that allow you to upload files (of any size by the way) and create a fairly upscale photo gallery. You can see one I have created on my own site here.

Videos

YouTube gives you code for each video that you can use to embed that video on your web site or blog. Once you copy this code, then in Wordpress you will have to be in the HTML editing mode, then you can paste in the code where you want the video to appear.

They give you options for different sizes. If you paste in the code and the video is too big, you can go back to YouTube and select a smaller size, then copy the new code and paste it into Wordpress again.

Summary

A CMS allows you many options, but it is not a magic bullet that gives you unlimited options, unless you have some knowledge of the tools and software of web design.

Even with a CMS, you have to get used to the interface, you will need some kind of photo editing software, and you may have to use some HTML code now and then. Even then, you may need to bring your web designer back in to handle certain things for you, or to make broader changes to the site.

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Getting the Most Out of Your Web Site

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

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.

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 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.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous