Brick, Mortar, and Digital Ephemera: How Local Internet Marketing Drives Profits

profitLocal internet marketing is one of those tools that has two areas of thought about it — there’s the people who use it, and the people who don’t understand it. There might also be people who know about it but don’t own a business to locally internet market, but they don’t count.

If you’re a business owner, you probably already use local internet marketing, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it — and if you’re not, it’s because you don’t get it. If you did, you would.

The biggest source of confusion about local internet marketing comes from business owners who don’t understand how a website (or “a bit of digital ephemera” as one shopkeeper described it to me) can bring people in to see your wares at your brick-and-mortar store. It’s part of a common bit of techno-agnosticism that says that the Internet and the real world are two different places that don’t interact.

But the fact is, even if you don’t, most of the people in your area look up whatever they plan to do online before they actually do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new recipe or a store in their area that caters to lovers of martial arts equipment. People don’t want to waste their time on something that might not work out if they can verify online that it will work before they have to leave the house.

The result, if you haven’t clicked yet, is this: they get on their computer and they look up something like “ninja gear Waldron Arkansas”. If they happen to see your store’s website first on the list that comes up on their screen, there’s a very good chance that they’ll be on the way in the door within the hour.

Now you can’t win that particular scenario if you don’t have a website, but if you’re interested, you can generally find someone to build you a website pretty inexpensively. Then there’s only one more key ingredient to make it start sending you customers: a little bit of organic SEO.

You Don’t Have Time to Do Social Bookmarking — Much Less Facebook or Twitter

facebook likeSocial connectivity is a wonderful part of the new Internet. The rise of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — the trifeca of modern business connection — has changed everything about the way the world markets. Getting testimonials isn’t a matter now of finding 6 or 7 individuals willing to go on video and talk about your product. It’s a matter of getting 60 or 70 thousand people to click that [Like] button.

Modern folk go online and they look up your business name, and they probably find your website first — but they also probably find it’s Facebook page second. If they click on it and find double-digit followers, they know instantly that you’re small time, offer a crappy product, or both. If they find some story about your business, they probably find it through a social bookmark on Reddit, Delicious, or a similar service.

Paying attention to social marketing isn’t an option any more — it’s the norm. The problem is that social marketing isn’t like normal organic SEO. Organic SEO can be — and is sometimes best — done in the middle of the night (or noon in Bangladesh.) Social networking is a matter of connecting to your base when they’re available, generally right in the middle of your work day. Do your social bookmarking late in the day, and by the time anyone who might care would vote it up, it’ll be off the first page and into the pit of oblivion.

That’s just the beginning, though. Social bookmarking takes time — because unless you build up a presence on a site like Reddit, no one will ever care about your new entries enough to vote them up. Like anything else ‘social’, bookmarking isn’t about dropping information and running — you have to create a persona, build relationships, and develop your presence in order to get enough respect to maximize the medium.

Facebook and Twitter are actually easier to get a following on, but take more constant effort. In the end, they don’t take any less time than bookmarking — and if you intend to put out any kind of quality content on a regular basis, might even take more.

What Do You Do When Website SEO Just Isn’t Enough?

There are thousands of webmasters across the country who have been in this position before: you know you’ve got a solid product, and you’ve been paying for professional website SEO services for months. You’re getting some pretty solid rankings going.

You’ve done everything right — you’ve got a diverse array of links coming from several different IP address, created at different times of day — and you’ve got the traffic to back it up. Google Analytics tells you that you get more than 100 hits from organic searches every single day, and the bounce rate is low, so you know they’re not just leaving because they didn’t expect to end up at a sales page.

What do you do? It’s obvious that your SEO efforts are working — and every client who actually purchased your product (or service) has had excellent things to say about it. You haven’t had a single refund request, and you’ve got testimonials up the wahzoo. The only problem is that your website just doesn’t turn visitors into customers the way it should.

Well, there are several options, but let’s take a look at the best:

1) Get Better Copy
Surfers who don’t like what they see will bounce, and Analytics will tell you that they’ve bounced. If you have visitors that stick around for 30 seconds to a few minutes and they still don’t buy from you, the problem is with your copy. You might want to consider finding a professional copyrighter and asking them to rework your page. You’ll want your SEO company to work together with him and make sure your keywords still place properly, as well.

2) Change Your Goal
Sometimes, a product just isn’t a “must buy” — and there’s not a lot you’re going to do to convince visitors to hand over their money. Some gurus will tell you that you have to start over and find a new product; only “must buy”s are viable online. Others will tell you that those gurus are dumb.

What you do need to do is switch away from trying to get them to buy right away, and move to a strategy of simply reminding them that you exist every once in a while and telling them why they should consider buying from you. Targeted email marketing is probably your best bet at that point. Talk to your SEO company today.

SEO in a Jersey: The Full Court Press Release Service

newsMuch like your fantasy football team winning their season, there is a strong element of luck involved in writing a dispatch to a press release service. Certainly, every press release will get listed on a few websites, and those press releases will provide simple backlinks for a short time until they get outdated and removed from the archives. But that’s not really the purpose of a press release — it’s just the door prize, as it were. The real goal is viral exposure. That’s why, when you write for a press release service, you have to write well.

Headliners Don’t Have to Be Haters
There was a fascinating article that came out of a journalists’ conference recently, talking about the value of a funny headline. It claims that website SEO is killing clever headlining, because puns don’t translate well into search engine terms. To be blunt, that’s a pile of hooey. SEO keywords don’t mean no creativity — you just have to retain the coherence of the keyword while you build the clever part around it. This article could be called “SHIFT KEY NEEDS PRESS-RELEASE SERVICE” or “Jailed Journalists Seek Press Release Service.” It would have to be written to tie it all together, of course, but that’s what they pay writers like me for, after all.

The Strength of A Strong Hook Shot
There’s nothing more disappointing than watching your favorite team bust into the court, pumped up and ready to go, and then watch then get crushed so badly in the first few minutes that their morale breaks. There’s also nothing quite as sad as following a brilliant headline into a press release and finding it…lacking. So every press release needs to have a powerful hook — something to drive a journalist that’s casually glancing over the press release to want to post it on his website or print it in his publication.

An Easy Lay-Up
Finally, a press release without a call to action is like a clean fast-break with no lay-up at the basket. No matter how killer your headline and how strong you hook, if you can’t sink the last ball at the buzzer, you won’t win the game, end of story. Write with the end in mind, toss it up, and make it stick.

Custom Blog Creation Does Nothing Without Regular Blog Posting

fresh blog postingNo matter how much you pay for it, getting a high-end SEO company to do some custom blog creation for you is a complete waste of time unless you have someone — on-staff or freelance — to engage in regular blog posting as well. A blog is not a one-time expense — no matter what some crazy gurus want to tell you about autoposters, content shufflers, or other blackhat garbage.

The truth about blogs is that search engines love them. New content is like catnip to a search engine: it drives them crazy. They’ll give any new content a fair shake at the front page for a short period of time. But that’s not really the key to blogging success unless you prefer your success one twenty-minute burst at a time. If you really want to take advantage of that kitty-dro, you need to keep posting fresh content on a regular basis.

Every time that you post fresh content to your blog, assuming that content is relevant to the rest of the posts you’ve made on your blog, the search engines add a little bit more authority to your site regarding the keywords that are in your posts. Of course, at the same time, you don’t want to post exclusively on the same couple of keywords, because eventually they’ll assume you’re keyword stuffing and ignore you. Also, don’t schedule your posts to be released at the same time every X days — the search engines hate repetitive timestamps.

Now, this is not to be said that posting regularly is the sum total of great bloggery, either. You do still need a qualified expert to set up your blog in accordance to a myriad of SEO rules that are hardly obvious to the casual businessperson. You’re still best off a URL that reflects one of your choicest keywords — and if you can buy one that’s been in existence for a few uninterrupted years, it’ll help a lot. Both custom blog creation and regular blog posting are necessary to make a good blog truly great.

Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking: Cheap And Easy SEO

social bookmarkingThere are a lot of ways to get your SEO on, and they range from the expensive and complex (custom blog creation, web 2.0 property linkrings) to the cheap and easy (directory submission, social bookmarking). Today, we’re going to take a look at that second category: cheap and easy SEO that anyone can wrap their minds around.

Directory Submission
The Internet is full of directories of all kinds. There are website directories, article directories, graphical directories, and many more. If you have the material to submit to a directory (and you can pass whatever rules it’s set to prevent just anyone from slapping stuff up on it’s portal), you’ve got an instant backlink just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Of course, it helps if the material is actually relevant to your website, and it helps even more if the directory uses dofollow links, but still, that’s not all that hard to accomplish. Granted, one single backlink from one single directory isn’t going to amount to much unless it’s one of the biggest directories of it’s type — and those big directories tend to have the strictest rules on what they’ll allow on their site. So you need either the expertise to navigate those rules or a massive list of lesser directories and a few hours to sit around and submit to all of them.

Social Bookmarking
social bookmarking signSocial bookmarking is what you do on all those popular sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and their ilk. It’s a quick and easy process in which you open an account and then turn in some bookmarks to your various web pages. Voila! Instant backlink, and just maybe someone will come across your bookmark and follow it on it’s own merit.

It’s not quite that easy, though, because not all social bookmarking sites use dofollow links, so you have to know which ones are worth submitting to. Also, if you drop even a small hint on your social profile on those bookmarking sites, the search engines will be able to tell that you opened the account and they’ll discount the value of those links down to nearly zero. There’s also the issue that social bookmarking sites take an ongoing investment if you intend to get any long-term traffic from them.

In the end, even the cheap and easy SEO is best done by the experts, it seems.

Why DIY PPC Management is DTF

If you’re not familiar with the TLAs — that’s Three Letter Acronyms — ‘Why DIY PPC Management is DTF’ means “Why do it yourself pay per click management is doomed to fail.” In even plainer language, what that says is that if you’re trying to use pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords and you don’t have expert help, you’re basically throwing money down a hole from which it will never return.

Don’t get me wrong – if you do have a solid PPC manager on your side, the instant and permanent first page placement that the “sponsored link” of Adwords gives you is one of the most valuable tools a startup web business can possibly have. With a webpage that converts well and the right PPC keywords under your belt, the profits come rolling in. The PPC management company will watch over your campaigns, seeing what keywords are scoring big and which are losers, continually adjusting your list and your bids so that you stay on top of the game.

And that’s the first big drawback of do-it-yourself PPC management: it takes a lot of time to do right. Pay-per-click requires a mountain of setup, and unlike traditional banner or classified ads, it doesn’t stop once you’re done with the setup. Bids on keywords change constantly, and some keywords can drop out of use quite suddenly with subtle changes in the marketplace. If you have enough time to do your own PPC management correctly, you can be virtually guaranteed that you’re neglecting some other part of your business in the process.

The second drawback is the sheer amount of data to be sorted through. For example, a good list of PPC keywords can be literally three or four hundred items long, and every one of those keywords has several attributes attached to it: searches per day, competing bids, conversions per click, and other numerical attributes as well as some qualitative aspects such as whether or not the phrase has “buying words” in it. The amount of expertise required to correctly interpret the mountain of information involved is extensive to say the least.

In short, if you want to get into the realm of pay-per-click advertising, get a good PPC management team on your side, or suffer the consequences.

Targeted Email Marketing Features for Business

targeted email

Are you thinking of investing in small business email marketing? Before you commit to a specific email marketing company, you should assemble a list of the features you desire. Read on for some popular targeted email marketing features to consider.

1. Email Templates

In order to hold a reader’s attention, your messages have to be visually compelling, featuring images of your products and services. These messages are also valuable branding opportunities, and should be enhanced to include your company colors and logo whenever possible.

Some email marketing services allow users to customize their own templates, while others handle the process on their end. Depending on the company you choose, you might even be able to request a custom design.

No matter where your design comes from, make sure that your email marketing company checks its templates in multiple browsers and email clients so that your messages will always appear as intended.

2. Social Networking

Who doesn’t like killing two birds with one stone? At many email marketing services, targeted email marketing and social networking go hand in hand. For example, certain services allow you to automatically tweet a copy of every email newsletter you send out.

Additionally, email messages can be modified to include social sharing buttons, encouraging users to share your newsletters on Facebook, Twitter, and other services. This can help spread the word about your business on a variety of platforms, all from a single email!

3. Contact List Management

For effective small business email marketing, you have to make sure that your messages are reaching the right people. Ideally, you want a large distribution list, consisting solely of readers who are interested in your products or services.

To this end, most email marketing services include contact list management capabilities. This could involve API integration, so that you can add a sign up form on your webpage or blog to increase your subscriber count.

A good marketing company will also monitor bounces and unsubscribes to make sure your contact list includes only the proper audience.

4. Statistical Reporting

Email campaigns are extremely easy to track, and any good email marketing service will send you relevant statistics on a regular basis. Your statistics should tell you how many people are reading and forwarding your messages, in addition to how many clicks the various links in your newsletters are receiving. If your email marketing campaign involves social networking, you should be able to see statistics on social media shares as well.

Some email marketing services feature email comparisons, so you can see how your newsletters are doing when stacked against similar campaigns.

Depending on your budget and business goals, your targeted email marketing campaign may not require all of these features. Still, it’s important to explore your options, consider your needs, and know which features to demand from a potential marketing company.

Latest Trends In Search Engine Optimization

In the Search engine optimization industry, things keep on changing. If you wish to stand in the field and increase your website rank, you must discover the adjustments which are coming. You must make your one way links related if they should be efficient. Initially there were some parameters to rank your websites. But now, some are included and some are excluded.

Lately the speed of web site has been included in the ranking algorithm. Those sites that loads slowly aren’t considered being at par with that which loads quick. So each and every website should make theirs load quick. To enhance the loading speed has turn out to be essential now. Researches say that those sites that have high ranks are usually quick loaders. People stay for long time and browse through the web pages only in quick loading sites. This will be the main cause that loading speed is a point of interest these days.

Also, search engines work to remove the additional weight of .gov and .edu sites. This is because of the high quantity of spam that these sites get. Because of their ranking technique and reputation, numerous are going after them. So, these sites are now considered as normal sites and the special rankings were removed from them. Therefore, getting links from these sites will not assist you much.

Do not link to low quality websites. Low quality websites are usually link farms. They are often referred to as landing pages. These landing pages have turn out to be a home of inbound links. But search engines penalize such sites now. Only for those who have great content, you can stand in the industry. You must develop your web site first before you start your Los Angeles SEO venture.

Your links should be natural. Non related links don’t have any worth in Search engine optimization. If you link to a particular web site, you must be able to convince Google that that particular website is associated to your specialized niche. Naturalness of your links is considered as an important factor by Google. You must be able to obtain links from variety of reliable and related sources with a Los AngelesĀ  SEO service.

When you develop links with a link building service, don’t merely concentrate on one method of linking. This means merely pursuing links through article writing or blog commenting alone will not assist you. Exactly the same types of links again and again will not have much worth. You must try to get links from social media marketing sites, social net working sites, new sites, old sites, item selling sites, service supplying sites, face book, twitter and other book marking sites like Digg and Del.ici.ous. With wide variety of links, you can get good results soon.

Zen And The Art of First Page Placement

First page placement isn’t a luxury in today’s competitive internet marketplace. Studies have proven that less than 2% of searchers ever leave the first page when they search Google. The thing is, any given keyword can only have 10 entries on that first page (given that most people never change their search settings). So the more competition there is, the more obscure the keywords you have to seek out in order to eek out a place on that first page.

But there’s a problem — the more obscure the keyword is, the fewer people are searching for it. It might be easier to wrangle your way to the top of the list with a little bit of organic SEO, but will it be worth as much when you get there?

This is where the Zen comes in. See, SEO is like a koan: the harder you think about it, the less likely you are to get it right. Zen koans aren’t meant to convey an idea directly, they’re meant to confound. SEO offers the same kind of puzzle. It can often seem like any action you take only leads you further away from a feeling of accomplishment and success.

The answer, interestingly, is the same in SEO as it is in Zen: wait, breathe, commit to the path without understanding how it works, and first page placement will come just as suddenly and unexpectedly as enlightenment. The reasons why are legion, but it boils down to the fact that SEO builds slowly over time, but Google only updates their authority rankings every once in a while. The result is that one afternoon, because Google decided to update, all of those pages that you’ve been linking to will suddenly matter, and first page placement will be upon you.

Zen masters have a saying: “Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” SEO is the same way — just because you’ve reached Page One, you don’t get to stop working. Competition will nip at your heels and try to knock you off the top 10 in a heartbeat. You never get to stop working — you just get to work and be enlightened at the same time.