Internet Marketing and Lead Generation
Online marketing tools and technology for SMB service businesses
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
I was contacted today by a guy who was nice enough to point out a broken link on this website. Very cool of him (thanks, Tim). After I sent Tim a thank you email he replied with a question about finding a good overseas (inexpensive) service provider who can help with search engine optimization (SEO), and especially link building (an important part of SEO). Tim is not the only person looking for the holy grail of SEO service providers (cheap and effective), but in my experience – as with so many other services – quality SEO and link building is best done onshore, rather than offshore. That’s why we still do almost all of this type of work in-house ourselves. Here’s a paraphrasing of my brief email exchange with Tim: >> Continue reading
Regardless of what you think of Microsoft and its products (granted, not everyone is a fan of the goliath), their new serch engine, Bing, is winning over the hearts and mice of a certain segment of internet users. If this trend continues, this could lead to downward pressure on ad prices, as well as a better return on investment for search engine marketing efforts across all three of the top search engines.
Just this past month Bing gained more of a percentage of market share than any of the other major search engines – up more than 22% from July, according to Nielsen. With Google’s perennial firm grasp on the #1 spot, this leaves Yahoo! and Bing to duke it out for numero dos…and Bing is gaining ground fast. >> Continue reading
We’ve mentioned before that your modern business website should be built to utilize some form of content management system (CMS), and that our favorite CMS is WordPress…because of its extensibility, scalability, aesthetics, price (free), and its massive community of dedicated users providing support to each other. If you’re a web publisher, WordPress may be a great solution for you, too…but before you decide to use WordPress as your CMS, you’ll need to decide between the two primary “flavors” available – WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
The main difference between the two is that the “.com” version of the software is hosted by WordPress for free (meaning not only the software is free, but so is the hosting). The “.org” version, also called the “self hosted” version, is the one you download and install on your own web hosting server (or one that you rent). This might sound like WordPress.com is more appropriate for newbies or smaller websites, and while is probably the case, both versions are equally capable of handling the needs of very busy web properties. With that in mind, here are some other notable differences that can help you decide which would be best for you. >> Continue reading
There are professions that are, for the most part, well enough understood by most people that a member of that profession can – at a cocktail party, for example – in just a few words, state what he does for a living and people just kind of get it.
Then there are the rest of us…those who either have to accept the blank stare or tailor an explanation based on what little we know about the person asking “what do you do?” You could always make something up or deflect, but let’s pretend you actually want this guy to know what you do. >> Continue reading
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