Your Street Address on Your Web Site

By John Eberhard

I came across a really interesting issue this week in regards to how you present the street address of your company on a web site.

A prospect, located in a large suburban city of Los Angeles, was concerned that when searching for their category of business, along with “Los Angeles” in the search field, that their business did not come up at all. In other words, and I’ll change the category to keep things discreet, if you searched for “copper containers Los Angeles” a company whose business is located in Glendale, CA would not come up.

Now Glendale is a major suburb of L.A. and is definitely part of the L.A. metro area and is actually not far from downtown L.A.

In this case we were looking into how to specifically improve the position of this company’s Google Maps/Places listing, which as I mentioned did not come up at all when searching for this category with “Los Angeles” included. Their listing came up first when you searched for their category with the word “Glendale” included. But the thing is that hardly anyone would search for this category of thing with the word “Glendale” included. This particular business is not a neighborhood thing like a dentist. If someone was going to search for them with a city name attached, it would be the name of the metro area, in this case Los Angeles.

In searching myself for this category with the words “Los Angeles” in the search field, I reviewed all the other Google Maps listings of other companies in this category. And I noticed a very interesting thing. Every one of them listed their city as “Los Angeles.” And in going to several of their web sites, they listed their city name on the web site as “Los Angeles,” regardless of whether they were in a suburb of L.A.

This may seem like a stupid minor detail. But consider that handling this one minor point right could mean the difference between your listing coming up and not coming up at all.

So here’s how you decide how to handle this. If your company is a local business that handles customers only from a small part of town, such as in a cluster of 4-5 suburbs (like a health care practice or a retail store), then you should leave your address as the exact suburb that you are in.

But if your business handles customers for an entire metro area, or if your business is regional or national, you should list your company address on your web site, wherever it appears on the site, as the metro city, i.e. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, etc. And your Google Maps listing and all other local listings on other sites should list the metro city too.

Doing this one simple action will significantly improve your online visibility and website marketing.

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Promoting Yourself as an Artist

by John Eberhard

Back in the 1980s I made a living working as a musician, playing in nightclubs around New England.

I didn’t know much about marketing back then, but a fellow musician had told me the formula for getting work in nightclubs. He said you needed to have a good quality demo tape of the band, about 4-8 songs, not whole songs but snippets, an 8x10” glossy photo of the band, and a song list. He said you make up a package with all that in it, locate agents who book the clubs where you want to play, and call them and send them that package.

That formula turned out to be pretty good, as I was able to book bands pretty steadily using it. That was just for booking a cover band working in nightclubs. The formula for getting a band a recording contract would of course be more extensive and more complex.

But the point is this: to be successful in any sector of the arts requires that you not only have your act together artistically, but that you find out what the successful formula is marketing-wise for getting where you want to go. And then market yourself aggressively using that formula.

Back in the day I think I had the idea that if I just was really good at what I did as a musician, then things would work out alright. I didn’t have the idea that I had to aggressively market myself. And certainly I was never taught to market myself, even at Berklee College of Music.

I think that with too many artistic schools today, they place all the emphasis on teaching the artistic technique, and completely forget to include teaching students that to be successful as an artist you have to promote yourself, and have a feel for how the business works. An artist is essentially an entrepreneur. Because let’s not forget, that if you don’t eventually start making money with your art, it will of necessity be relegated to the status of a hobby after a time. Because as you get older, your monetary needs will increase.

Making Money with Art

First of all, realize that your goals need to include getting paid for doing your art. This sometimes requires a reality shift, because so often, musicians, actors, dancers, and other artists are expected and asked to perform their art for free. Artists have to fight this expectation, because it is inherently unfair. So finding ways of getting paid has to be part of your thought process, not only for down the road, but also for right now.

Next, figure out what your eventual goal is, and find other successful artists who have achieved that goal. Ask them what the formula is for promoting yourself as an artist to achieve that goal. Sometimes successful artists will jealously guard the secret of their formula, being afraid of competition. But often, especially in Los Angeles, artists of various types will give seminars on succeeding in the business, or you can find books giving this type of information. Be aware also that that formula will change from time to time, so make sure you have up to date information.

Using the Internet

Regardless of the specific formula needed to achieve your specific goal in your artistic field, there are some universal opportunities afforded by the Internet today for online marketing, and all artists can make use of these.

• Facebook: Set up a personal profile and a fan page on Facebook, then get lots of friends on the personal profile and get lots of people to “like” your fan page. Then start posting status updates regularly (to both), just saying what you are doing as an artist. Don’t just use text, but include photos, links to videos, links to music clips, links to articles, etc. That gives it more impact.
• Blogs: Start a blog, and start posting material to it on a regular basis. This can be similar to what you would post on Facebook, but more extensive. Write articles, write updates on what you are doing as an artist. Post pictures, videos, music clips, etc., whatever is appropriate for your field to show your work. Make sure you send a notification to the blog search engines every time you post something. You can use www.pingomatic.com, or Wordpress blogs do this automatically.
• Twitter: Start an account on Twitter and start following lots of people and get them to follow you back. Try to target people who would potentially be a consumer for your artistic product. With Twitter you can target people in a certain geographical area, you can target people who have certain words or phrases in their bio, or target people who write certain words or phrases in their tweets.
• Ping.fm: This site allows you to start an account, then hook up all your other social media accounts to it. Then you can post status updates from Ping.fm, and they will automatically go out to all your social media accounts and all your friends/followers will see them.
• YouTube: Get some videos made of your work or performances, and post them to YouTube. Then promote the video on all other online media, such as through your blog, Facebook and Twitter, etc.

LinkedIn is generally considered to be a business networking site, so that may or may not be useful to you as an artist. MySpace used to be THE social media site, but has declined severely over the last couple years. Bands still use it.

Summary

In order for you to be successful long term as an artist, you have to exchange your work with the public, and they have to pay you money. Unfortunately our society is not very good about rewarding artists, so you not only have to be good, but you have to market yourself aggressively. And part of that has to include finding the correct formula of promoting yourself to reach the so-called big time.

Good luck with promoting your artistic endeavors.

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Use of Autoresponders

By John Eberhard

An autoresponder is a system that can be set up that sends a person a series of emails. There are a number of useful and important uses for autoresponders.

There are a number of email services available online that include autoresponders, including Aweber, iContact, and Mailchimp, where you pay a monthly fee for the service.

Drip Emails

One of the first ways to use an autoresponder is to create a series of emails that will be sent to someone after they fill out a more-information form on a web site. This is often referred to as a series of “drip emails,” so called because it’s like dripping water on the person’s head, each drip being a communication. Usually these are HTML emails, meaning they can have graphics and links in them like a web page.

Let’s say you have a contact form on your web site for someone who wants more information on your products or services. What I often do is create a series of 3-4 HTML emails. The first one goes out to the person as soon as he hits submit, and will say basically “Thanks for filling out our form, we will get back to you right away or you can call us at ____.”

Then I set it up so the second email goes out say 4 days later after the person filled out the form. This is more of a sales letter and sells the person on the services or products, and urges him to call in. This assumes that he hasn’t been reached yet. But even if he has, no harm done. He has just received more sales text.

Now the third email can go out say 4 days after the second email, or 8 days after the person filled out the form. This can be anything from a longer article about the products or services, to a listing of testimonials, to a link to a video. And depending on what content you have to send, you could also send out a 4th, 5th and 6th email.

Basically the purpose of setting up a drip email system like for sending to people who fill out a form on site, is that you are sending them sales oriented communication. And it can help in cases where you call but fail to reach the person or he doesn’t call you back.

In all cases, when someone fills out a form and it starts the whole drip email system like this, I also add him to the general email list for the company and he will receive all other email communication, such as an email newsletter or other sales oriented emails. If you use one of the online services like Aweber, Mailchimp or iContact, the service will automatically add a link at the bottom for people to opt out of the list. I usually tell the recipient in the first email that he is being added to our general email list and he can opt out at any time.

Offering Free Reports

A very effective technique in terms of collecting names and email addresses is to create some kind of free information property such as a free report or “white paper” (a fancy name for a free report), on a topic related to your products or services. Then you offer that on your web site for free, but the person has to fill in the form and give you his name and email address to get it.

So with this scenario, you create a series of drip emails just like above, but the first one gives a link where the person can download the free report you are offering. You put the report in PDF format, put it online, then link to that in the first email. Then the person clicks on it and the PDF opens in their web browser, and they can save it to their hard disk. In this way you don’t have to be bothered with manually receiving the emails and emailing them the free report, which is especially important if you get a high volume of responses.

In this type of situation I would still create a series of emails, not just the one sending them the link to the free report, as that gives you an opportunity to send them sales oriented material about your products or services.

Pre-Written Articles or Newsletters

I have one client who has written a year’s worth of articles and has his autoresponder set up so that when a person fills in one of his online forms, that starts a series of over 50 articles that are sent to the person. This is a really good idea, especially if you have a lot of content that you’ve already written.

For myself, I write an article and send out a newsletter every week, so people who contact me about services, or who request one of my free reports, all get added to that list and receive my email newsletters. In my case I haven’t written a ton of them in advance but the people just receive the new ones I write every week.

Top of Mind Awareness

The goal with all of this is to get the person to buy something from you right away. But if that doesn’t happen - and some people aren’t ready to buy right away but still could buy later – then you will be creating top of mind awareness. That means that when the person thinks of your product or service category, he will tend to think of you, because you are reminding him of your company on a regular basis.

And don’t forget that any autoresponder email you send out should include your phone number, your physical address (that’s a US law), and links to your web site. The whole point is that you’re trying to make it easy for someone to contact you and buy from you.

Good luck with your email marketing.

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Why You Need to Be Blogging

By John Eberhard

Blogging is something that you can do that doesn’t cost you anything, and it drives traffic. It can drive traffic to a standalone blog or a blog that is part of your main web site.

How does it drive traffic?

There is a network of blog search engines, and every time you post something on your blog, you have to notify these search engines and your new content will be included in those search engines. And people search and find your content and come to your blog.

Wordpress blogs are set up by default to send a notification to all the blog search engines every time you post something new. For Typepad, Blogspot, Posterous or other blogs, you can send a notification (called a “ping”) to these search engines for free at www.pingomatic.com.

If you have a standalone blog, meaning one that is not part of your main site but is on a separate web address, then you have to put things in the sidebars that will get them to come back to your main web site. See one of my blogs to see how I do this:
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/

Notice that I have ads in the sidebars promoting my book and a free eBook, as well as links to my other sites and my various services.

I track traffic to my main web site at www.realwebmarketing.net using Google Analytics, and my blogs are the biggest single traffic source to that web site over the last two years (even bigger than Google).

Setting Up a Blog

There are several ways to set up a blog:

• Wordpress: You can set up a hosting account and have Wordpress installed on it. You can also set up a sub-folder under an existing web site and install Wordpress in just that folder, so that the address of the blog would be www.yourmainwebsite.com/blog.
• Typepad: You can set up an account with Typepad who will then host your blog, so you don’t need a separate hosting account. You can use a custom web address that you register.
• Free Blogs: There are several free blogs, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, and Blog.com. Note that Wordpress.com is a free blogging system and is different from having a hosting account and installing Wordpress there. I know, it’s pretty confusing. We used to use LiveJournal.com but the site has been broken for some time, and we used to use Tumblr.com, but they got all high and mighty on us and closed down our accounts because we (gasp!) wrote blog posts with links to other sites. Recently Wordpress.com has also started closing down accounts if you write blog posts with links in them to other web sites.

Linking in Your Blog Posts

One of the advantages of blogging is that you can put links inside your blog posts, to pages on your main site. And getting lots of links coming back to your main site helps its search engine rankings.

Putting links into your blog posts is very smart to do and over time will add a fair number of new links to your site. I would put a max of 3 links into each blog post.

As mentioned some of the free blogs are objecting to links from your blog to commercial web sites, which I think is idiotic and symptomatic of the general “anti marketing” bias within the IT community. So my advice is not to use Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com any more.

What to Write About

The next question is what to write about and how often. You should write something new and post it to your blog at least once a month, or more ideally, once a week.

You can write an article for your blog of anywhere between 300 and 1500 words. I’ve heard people say that you should not write anything over 700 words for a blog post but I can’t see any reason for that. Pick some topic related to your industry that has helpful information in it, i.e. it is not just a pitch for people to buy something.

In addition to writing an article, you can also write a short comment about some other content on the web, with a link to that content. You can also post a video from YouTube so that it displays right in the blog. So you can see that you do not have to write a full blown article to be able to post something.

It’s a good idea to include some high traffic keywords in your blog posts, because once that post gets included in the blog search engines, more people will find it due to searching for those keywords.

Good luck with blogging.

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Selecting Keywords Today

Selecting Keywords Today
by John Eberhard

The ways in which keywords are selected has changed a lot over the years. Just in looking back on the articles I have written over the last five years, I was shocked at how much it has changed.

The first thing to do today is to determine how you will be using the keywords. Will it be for pay per click advertising? Will it be for search engine optimization (SEO)? And if for SEO, are you doing SEO for a strictly local business?

SEO Keywords

Let’s say you are selecting keywords for SEO, and first let’s take the scenario that yours is a national business, meaning you have customers all over.

At the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing they are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

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, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition and Number of Searches

When selecting keywords for SEO, one of, if not the primary consideration, is the number of sites that are competing for that keyword. The other primary consideration is the number of people searching for that keyword. The key is to find keywords that have low competing sites, and high search traffic.

When I am doing keyword research, I compile a spreadsheet with the keywords, and then I put the keywords into a software package I use called Market Samurai. This software finds the number of searches for each keyword, and the number of sites that are competing for that keyword. I used to use Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, both online services where you pay monthly. One advantage to Market Samurai is that you pay once, and it’s a good program.

Once I have the search and competition data, I export the data into a new spreadsheet. Then I sort the list by the competition data, and put the keywords into groups according to the number of competing sites. The reason for this is that if you have a keyword that has 1 million competing sites, you are just not going to be able to rank well for that keyword – period. At least not for a fairly long period of time.

As mentioned above, the key is to find keywords that have low competing sites, and high search traffic.

When I am sorting through the keywords I try to select from my first group, which has the lowest number of competing sites, but select keywords within that group that have high search traffic. And you have to consider the 3 levels of keyword searching and select keywords that are more likely to be used by people who are closest to the buying part of the sales cycle.

Once you select your keywords, the next job is to write titles and descriptions for each of your pages that use those keywords.

Local SEO

When we are talking specifically about local SEO, we are talking about setting up your site to rank well for local keywords. So what’s a local keyword?

By “local keyword” I mean a keyword that mentions your topic and also includes the name of a city or town in your area. Like “dentist Glendale” or “computer repair Los Angeles” or “pizza Sylmar.”

Local keywords tend to be much easier to start ranking well for. But a caution which I have mentioned before: I see a number of supposed SEO experts selling people on how they will get them to rank on page one of Google for their local oriented keywords. And they can. But the point is, how many people are entering those keywords? If you rank on page one of Google for a keyword that has 2 searches per month, what good does it do? I’ll remove any uncertainty and answer – None!

So getting your site to rank well for local keywords is a great idea. But before you spend any money on such a plan, make sure the person tells you, for each of the keywords, how much search traffic they are getting. That way you’ll know if you are investing in something that is worthwhile.

Keywords for Pay Per Click (PPC)

With pay per click advertising on Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center, the rules for selecting keywords are very different.

With pay per click you want keywords that have as many searches as possible. You don’t care as much how many competing sites there are. The number of people that enter your keywords in pay per click is called the number of impressions, and you want high impressions because that will give you more people clicking on your ads.

So in PPC you DO want to use more general keywords, because they will get you more impressions and more clicks.

But, you have to also consider conversions. In PPC a “conversion” is definied as some who came to your site from your PPC advertising and then responded, either by filling out a form or calling you and becoming a lead, or by buying something if you are selling something directly online.

With Google AdWords and MSN Ad Center, there is something called “conversion code” which you put on a certain page of your site, and that sends a message back to the interface telling it that a conversion has occurred.

It is vital in PPC to set up this conversion code on your site. One of the advantages is that your Google or MSN interface will then show which keywords people typed in, that resulted in a conversion. This is important because although it is OK to use general, one word keywords in PPC, you might find after a month or two that you are getting lots of clicks on those general keywords, but no conversions (remember earlier about keywords and the buying cycle). Since the name of the game with PPC is to get lots of conversions, for as little money as possible, in such a case you might want to pause the general keywords and stick with the ones that got you the conversions.

Good luck with keyword selection.

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Social Media Targeting

by John Eberhard

It’s all well and good to teach somebody how to set up social media accounts and all that, but a vital step in the whole process is to also teach them how to reach their specific target public with social media marketing.

Every business has what is known as a “target public.” This means a specific type of person or business that will buy that type of product or service.

For consumer products, there are likely demographic factors that would tend to identify the target public, such as age, sex, income level, interests, or hobbies. Like for a dance studio, the target public would most likely be young girls, ages 4-21, with an interest in dance. For a pet store, obviously it’s pet owners.

For business to business marketing, often you are trying to reach owners or executives of a specific type of business, i.e. dentists, home improvement companies, software companies, or whatever. Or you might be targeting businesses of a certain size, i.e. 20-100 employees, or a certain level of company income per year.

So the key with social media is to connect with people who would most likely be prospects for your product or service. You want to add those people to your friend, follower or connections list, on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which are the big three social media sites.

So how do you target them? That varies by site.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the easiest site to target specific publics. With Twitter you locate people that are your target public and then follow them, and then a certain percentage will follow you back. The idea is to build up the number of people following you, because those are the ones that will potentially see your messages.

Using a software program called Tweet Adder, or a site called www.tweepi.com:

• You can target people according to geography (within a certain number of miles from a specific city). This is important for local businesses who only do only business in a finite geographical area.
• You can target people who have certain keywords in their Twitter bio. So let’s say you are targeting dentists, well you just search for people who have the word “dentist” in their bio. Or you can target CEOs and Presidents of companies, writers, IT guys, etc.
• You can target people who have certain keywords in their status updates, also known as “tweets” (I hate that word, but what can you do?).
• You can follow people who are followers of another user, or that another user is following.

Using the above you can get creative and figure out how to target people who would be your prospects. Then follow them and get them to follow you back.

It is also important to send out messages (tweets) yourself, about what your business is doing, as other people will search for keywords that you are using, and will follow you.

Facebook

With Facebook one technique we use to target specific publics is to have the client join several Facebook groups that pertain to his particular industry and where the members of the group would be potential prospects. Then start friending those people.

For example, we have a client who does tax consulting for people buying airplanes. So for him we have had him join aviation type groups and befriend people who are members of those groups.

After a while you will build up enough friends that the “friend finder” will show people who have a lot of friends in common with you, and likely those people will be potential prospects too.

LinkedIn

Similar to Facebook, there are many groups you can join on LinkedIn. Then you can start proposing connection with people who are members of those groups.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a site that allows you to create an account and then hook up all your other social media accounts to it. Then you can send out a message or status update using Ping.fm, and it will go out on all your social media accounts. It allows you to type in something with a max of 140 characters, just like Twitter. This is a handy way of saving time in sending out your status updates, since you only have to log in to one site, not three or more.

Good luck targeting your public on social media sites.

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How to Decide Which Website Marketing Actions to Do, Part 2: Examples

by John Eberhard

In my last article I described all the major methods of website marketing for a company, and explained how to choose which ones are right for your company.

In this article I am going to give examples of different types of companies, and how I would evaluate each one for what marketing actions they should do online.

Home Improvement Company (Local, high ticket item)

• Pay per click advertising
• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing targeted at the local geographical area
• Video marketing, showing products
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects

Health Care Practice (Local, high ticket item)

• Pay per click advertising
• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the local geographical area
• Video marketing, showing practice owner and happy patients
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects

Consulting Company (National, high ticket item)

• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the target public
• Video marketing, showing owner and happy clients
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Book Author (National, low ticket item)

• Social media marketing targeted at people interested in the topic
• Blogging
• Video marketing, showing author
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects

Beauty Products Manufacturer (National, low ticket item)

• Search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to women in target age group
• Video marketing, showing products, happy customers, experts
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Dance Studio (Local, low ticket item)

• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the target public in local geographical area
• Video marketing, showing performances
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Insurance Agency (Local, relatively low ticket)

• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the local geographical area
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects

Software Company (National, high ticket)

• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the target public
• Video marketing, showing product, developers, customers
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Tax Consulting Company (Regional, high ticket)

• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the target public
• Video marketing, showing consultant, happy clients
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Private School (Local, high ticket item)

• Pay per click advertising
• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing targeted at parents in the local geographical area
• Video marketing, showing facilities, faculty and students
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects
• Blogging

Real Estate Agent (Local, high ticket)

• Pay per click advertising
• Google Maps/Places
• Local search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
• Social media marketing geared to the local geographical area
• Email marketing, once you build up a list of prospects

Good luck with marketing your company online.

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