Internet Marketing and Lead Generation
Online marketing tools and technology for SMB service businesses
Jul
Re-Visiting Keywords – the Most Important Part of Your Search Marketing Campaign
Posted by: Dan Cawrey
from happyhints.com
Have you ever thrown a bunch of money at an unsuccessful Google AdWords (search engine marketing (SEM)), campaign? Don’t be embarrassed, because businesses do this on a daily basis. Thinking that they have found a marketing goldmine, business owners will often throw good money after bad at an SEM campaign without the necessary up-front planning. However, the way the system is set up, you need to put quite a bit of thought into keywords before you ever spend a single dollar on SEM. The most obvious keywords may not necessarily offer you the best return on investment.
Focus on Cheap Keywords
Sometimes people just use commonly used, competitive, keywords in their SEM campaigns – the keywords that are consistently “bid up” by other advertisers who are targeting those same terms. You have to think smarter than your competition in bidding for keywords. The most popular keywords are also usually the most expensive. >> Continue reading
from jfaccento.quicm.net
Imagine your word of mouth advertising on steroids…minus, uh, the adverse health effects
A business owner asked me recently why his business should consider increasing their internet marketing spend if they were “doing quite well” on word of mouth alone. Initially I answered the question with another question(s):
What exactly do you mean by ‘doing quite well’? Don’t you want to ‘do better’?
He rolled his eyes and answered ‘yes’ (of course). But the real meat of his question was whether marketing can actually bolster whatever word of mouth (WOM) advertising his business already had rolling in. >> Continue reading
from bharathreddypunuru
Whether you know it or not, some of your customers are quickly evaluating the trustworthiness of your website and your company (compared to your competitors) based on Google’s PageRank (PR) – the zero to 10 ranking scale Google applies to all web pages. In the absence of other criteria, it’s actually an easy way for consumers to compare apples to apples. They use PR to determine at a glance how much Google trusts your website, and by extension, how much they should trust your website. The only problem is it’s an imperfect ranking system. Your competitors can fake a high PR, and likewise you could be the unknowing victim of a lower PR. The latter actually happened to GoDaddy.com recently – it looks like they were downgraded from PR7 to PR2 overnight. It’s a fluke (see blow), but if it can happen to them, it can happen to you.
There are other reasons to be aware of PageRank’s imperfect scale. Not least of which is if you are paying some freelancer to do link building or search engine optimization (SEO) for your business website. If you or your service provider don’t know how to identify a website’s true trustworthiness, you could be spending time (or money) acquiring links from the wrong sites. Sneaky website owners can actually fake high PR for the purpose of making their websites look more popular than they are. >> Continue reading
Apr
What Your Local 10 O’Clock News Team Can Tell You About How to Market Your Services
Posted by: Jeremy Reither
How many times have you heard a newscaster (or any non-expert) describe your industry’s services to a lay audience in a way that made you think, well that’s not actually the way it is? That’s because they’re trying to dumb down your offering into a 10-second spot to explain it to the consumer. Kind of like what you should be doing for some of your marketing campaigns.
The general public doesn’t understand what you do – and in fact they don’t want to. Consumers just want to know what you’re selling will benefit them. If you provide what I call “complex services” (like legal, medical, financial services / insurance, etc.) you’re probably too close to your business to know the best way to explain the value your company offers to customers. It’s been called the “curse of knowledge” – it means you know too much about what you’re selling to help someone else appreciate or understand it.
Understanding the mindset of the consumer can be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing. Unwrapping their wants, needs, and values are what marketing is all about, but all too often companies forget (or never learn) how to market in a way that is meaningful to their target audience.
But watch what the reporters on the evening news try to do – they boil down topics to their most essential emotional points, because that’s what consumers (their audience) respond to. In sales and marketing, perception is more important than substance…you need to know how consumers perceive your services. Listen to the ways the news team simplify what you do – it may not bee 100% accurate, but it can give you insight into the mind of the consumer, how they perceive your offerings, and what they believe sets one provider (ie: you) apart from another (ie: your competitors).
So pay attention to that 10 o’clock news report next time they’re doing a story on you or your competitors – there could be some gems in it for you and your marketing team.
Feb
How to Link Your Existing Social Networking Accounts to Your Newest One, Google Buzz
Posted by: Jeremy Reither
Putting Google Buzz to Work
If you thought LinkedIn and Facebook were enough of a time drain, and that there was no reason for you to get on Twitter just yet, then you’re probably just plain annoyed that Google launched their own Twitter-like platform called Buzz yesterday. Add it to the endless list of other social media networks vying for your attention – should you even bother? The answer is yes – because you can use it without any real ongoing effort on your part. Just link any sites you’re currently using (ie: your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to your Buzz account, and any new updates on those sites will automatically be “Buzzed” (the Buzz equivalent of a “Tweet”) to your followers. >> Continue reading
by youtube.com/user/Neomage134
If you’re going to spend your time on email marketing, a key consideration is the title of each and every email. It’s the only part of the email that virtually every recipient sees…and the ability of that title to get a reader’s attention has a major impact on the percentage of recipients who actually open the email (versus ignoring it, deleting it, or marking it as spam). You can’t get your message across to your audience unless they open that email. The guys in the LinkedIn Online Lead Generation group know this…which is, I guess, why their latest announcement email went out with this title:
“Your Baby is Ugly…”
How’s that for an attention getter? I don’t even have a baby, and it stopped me in my tracks. I not only opened up the email, but here I am blogging about it. And I might even attend the webinar they’re promoting. Count that as 2 points for the guys who sent the email. >> Continue reading
For a business that only serves local clientele, but has a website that gets visitors from all over the country, advertising revenue can be a legitimate source of revenue that only compliments your local business.
In talking to a prospective client about creative ways to monetize his website’s traffic, we discussed how he could make money from the significant traffic his site is receiving from parts of the country he doesn’t serve – by selling ad space on a page of the site dedicated to visitors from outside of his service area.
His helicopter tour company is based in Texas, and he’s only selling tours to people who are in, or who plan to visit Texas. But nearly 70% of the traffic to his website is delivered by search engines for non-geographic terms like “helicopter tours” and “helicopter sightseeing.” The majority of people searching those terms are not looking for Tours in Texas, but they visit his website anyway. In other words, the vast majority of the visitors to the website aren’t even looking for what this company has to offer. Seems a shame to just to ignore all those consumers, doesn’t it? >> Continue reading
Dec
Google Says a Slow Site Could Hurt Your Search Rankings. Test Your Page Speed.
Posted by: Jeremy Reither
The time it takes for your website to load used to be considered just a usability issue…a nuisance that perhaps your visitors didn’t like, but that search engines didn’t pay particular attention to. That slow loading site might have been a pain to use, but page speed wouldn’t have directly affected search engine rankings. Today, however, in Google’s attempt to deliver “better” search results (not just “relevant” search results) to its users, the new version of their search engine will be placing more value on the speed of the websites being ranked. If you’re concerned about search engine rankings, you should be concerned about your website speed, too. >> Continue reading
Nov
Tweet to Lead: Converting Your Twitter Followers to Leads Using Salesforce.com
Posted by: Jeremy Reither
Salesforce.com CRM software already offers robust “web to lead” functionality – built in with every version of Salesforce – that allows you to capture visitors’ information from your website. But with your diverse internet marketing efforts, what if you have other consumer contact points (like Twitter)? How do you convert those tweets to leads in Salesforce?
As part of the recently released Salesforce Service Cloud 2, “Salesforce for Twitter” is included for all new and existing Salesforce customers. Not only can you use the tool to monitor hashtags, keywords, and/or Twitter accounts — but these incoming Twitter messages can be integrated into the existing CRM system as business leads. >> Continue reading
I saw some reports recently (in Google’s Webmasters Tools) that help me illustrate something I’ve believed for a while now – that WordPress is simply a more search engine friendly content management system (CMS) than Joomla.
If you aren’t familiar with the differences between WordPress and Joomla, just know that choosing the CMS to run your website is one of the most important decisions you or your technical advisers will make in planning the development of your site. The CMS you choose can impact the scalability, usability, cost of development, and a number of other aspects of website ownership, including its “search engine friendliness.” WordPress is best known as blogging software, but can serve very well as a CMS.
The charts below illustrate what a difference I saw after we recently migrated one site from Joomla to WordPress. >> Continue reading
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