Online Marketing Advice, Tips & Strategies

Category: Internet Marketing (Page 1 of 2)

Monitor Your Website Traffic – Search Engine Marketing

An online business website that depends on promotion and sales needs a good search engine marketing strategy to be successful and profitable. Generating targeted traffic to the website is the main function of a search engine marketing strategy.

A variety of different traffic building methods and techniques can be used to attract traffic to a particular website. One such widely used methods of search engine marketing that is used by online businesses to generate traffic is “pay per click”. Pay per click is an acceptable method used to attract traffic to your websites, however it is important to monitor it frequently to determine its efficiency in generating traffic that is beneficial to the project.

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Is SEO Still Relevant? What It Is and Why It Matters

If you run a business, you want the dollars you spend to attract customers to be as effective as they can be. Back in the day, that might have been a little simpler. Advertising and marketing to build your brand was done in print publications, via networking and word of mouth referrals. But the internet, social media and search engines changed all of that.

All of a sudden, a working knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) seemed to be required to get any good results from your website. But is that true in 2020 like it was five years ago? Let’s find out.

First Things First: What is SEO

First of all, let’s be clear about what we mean when we say SEO. Most websites get the majority of their traffic from Google. Even if you don’t go to ‘Google.com’ if you use a search bar on an iPhone or an Android-powered phone, then that search bar is also powered by Google.

Here’s what most people don’t realise though. The ‘search results’ that appear after you put in a query like ‘dentist in Sydney’ is different for every single person. It’s based on the specific data that Google has about each of its users based on their estimated age, gender, previous searches, location, social media and a whole host of other things.

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How Can I Develop a Complete Online Law Firm Marketing Strategy?

Developing a complete online marketing strategy is important for pretty much all businesses, including law firms. For a law firm such as Perth based Culshaw Miller, having a complete digital marketing strategy will help you direct your marketing efforts, will help you identify your weak points, and will help you gain a competitive edge on other firms in your area.

Unfortunately, not all law firms make good use of their digital marketing budget. Money is wasted on inefficient or out-dated types of marketing, which means that results are well below what they could be. If you would like to get the most out of your law firm’s digital marketing budget, then keep reading!

Why Do We Need A Marketing Strategy?

This is one of the most common questions that we get asked by law firms. Well, the answer is simple:

“Without a clear marketing strategy, you won’t be able to direct spending to the right places. Your marketing budget will probably be wasted to some extent, and you won’t be getting maximum return on investment.”

Any large scale process involving the expenditure of money needs some sort of plan. When it comes to online marketing, a clear, comprehensive digital marketing strategy is the best way to plan.

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How to Manage Adwords Marketing with Fewer Keywords

adwords-account-structureWhile adwords marketing is often a great way to get traffic and conversions in your business, it often becomes overwhelming for the newcomer to manage, especially when you have a great many keywords. You can have better success for less cost using just 10 exact match keywords if you take into account these few tips.

  • Choose short tail keywords for your digital marketing campaign.
  • Advertise on Bing. The keywords you use for marketing, will cost less and you won’t start a bidding war because many advertisers stay in the Yahoo environment.
  • Segment your campaigns by state/region/city/zip codes as this allows you to use more instances of the same keywords. It also helps you to track more easily which keywords are performing best for each area.
  • Use standalone campaigns to test things like ad text and landing pages.
  • To make your ads different and push the competition down, use all the extensions you can. This can also increase your quality score (QS) rating.

 

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Things Web Analytics Can Teach You

For the purpose of SEO, you need to always be on the look out for the keywords that can bring in lots of traffic. However, it does not end there. What you also need to understand is, which keywords bring in more traffic, as well as conversions for you?

Unless you get visitors to become customers, to get huge traffic would be of no use. You should analyze, what gets you more visitors and also ensure that your sales are completed with them. This is where web analytics can be of immense help to you. You can literally listen to what your customers are saying by using web analytics tools, which are available.

The web analytical tools and test can give you the most valuable information about visitors. You can get a peek at their browsing and searching behavior.

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Search Engine Marketing Strategy

With growing technology, it has become easier to find any and everything on the Internet and the search engines play a vital role in helping people find relevant information.

Most Businesses have set up their websites and try to have their sites ranked high in the natural results of searches that are displayed to searchers.

This will bring the maximum exposure possible, and the ability to attract plenty of potential customers/clients.

The SEO’s job as we all know is to determine the keywords frequently used by visitors, but SEO alone is not enough. You need to conduct marketing efforts online that are aimed at increasing the traffic and conversion.

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Effective Pay Per Click landing pages

A landing page is the first page on your website that a potential customer will see when they click on your Google or Yahoo pay per click ad.

This page needs to be designed to convert the maximum number of visitors/leads.

Your landing pages should be professionally designed and should immediately confirm for the visitor that they will find what they came looking for by including the query term in the title and heading of the page.

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Utilizing Different Personality Types In Business

We’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes, are we not? We all have special skills to bring to the table, each of us good at one thing, none of us better at everything. Online marketing blog TopRank has a post on fitting all those snowflakes into one useful corporate snowman. Don’t you love that analogy?

It raises some interesting parallel discussions about how one could use customer’s personality types to market more efficiently. The Dominant customer could be sold with “Our product will help you conquer the world.” The Influential customer could be sold with “Get things done with our product.” The Steady customer could be sold with “Our product is the same tried, tested, and true solution you’ve come to expect.” And the Conscientious customer could be sold with “Our product is made with quality in mind.” Read more website strategies.

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Article Marketing – A Major Internet Marketing Strategy

Article marketing will let you establish yourself as an expert in your field, provide your site with increased traffic and lead to better search engine ranking for your site. Whatever be your area of expertise, you can be sure that there exists an audience, who is interested to learn more from you and there are many publishers, who are on the look out for low cost or free content.

However, simply writing and submitting articles that lack quality content is a waste of time and effort. Your articles provide you with an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field. You therefore need to write like an expert. It is the best articles that fetch the best results.

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Can Advertisers Still See The Forest For The Trees?

A fascinating and soul-searching read at hand over at the Central Desktop Blog, on The evolution of the ad campaign. It talks about how moving the marketing industry into the web age has led to some advantages, but some disadvantages as well. The interesting point is the lack of “big ideas”.

We don’t see those really inspired advertisers that capture our interest. Instead, everything kind of blends into a slick, over-produced corn mush, with hardly any commercial distinguishable from product to product. Take this away – advertising is all about getting your potential customer to remember your product. If your marketing strategy doesn’t stand out in any particular way, your product won’t either.

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He’s Right, This YouTube Ad Is Compelling!

You know what your goal should be with marketing? To make your advertisement so interesting that the user forgot that it wasn’t why they came there in the first place.

This post on Content Marketing Done Right is a good example. There’s one of those ads on YouTube – where you normally sit there waiting for the ‘skip ad’ button to pop up. Except, saith Chris Brogan, this ad is produced so well and hooks you so thoroughly that it’s tough to stop watching it.

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Are Good Guys Destined to Finish Last?

A very sobering blog post up at SearchEngineWatch, White Hats: This is Why You’re Getting Beaten, about how the bad guys are mopping the floor with the good guys.

(and is anybody else getting tired of the hat metaphor?)

Anyway, as good a point as is made there, we’d like to ask, “Is it really that way?” Because here’s the thing: attracting traffic to your website is all about converting sellers, via ads and point of sale. No matter what, that’s the goal.

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What’s in a Domain Name? Maybe Less Than Meets the Eye?

It’s interesting to see Marketing Vox’s reaction to the sale of the domain sex.com. $13 million may sound like a sexy price, but is it really worth it? Vox says maybe so. We’re going to have to go with “maybe not.”

Now, for a unique brand name, yes. That’s expected. Pepsi had better control pepsi.com, and all the other possible pepsi-dot-anythings out there. Ditto for Microsoft, Walmart, Disney, and so on. We expect that a company that big can afford to control its own brand name, at least that far.

But when you get to generic domain nouns, not so much. Being in the candy business and owning “candy.com” at first sounds like a great idea… in 1998. But who, these days, actually blindly types domains into the address bar? We’d bet nine out of ten users today couldn’t tell us where the address bar is. Hoping to hit Google searches is the next bid, but Google searches don’t always blindly follow the domain name either.

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When Idealism Trumps Profit – In the Wrong Direction

California may be far away geographically, but there’s an issue right there that hits home for every web marketer. It’s really quite simple: Californians are going to vote soon on “proposition 19,” a resolution to de-criminalize marijuana for personal use. Note, we’re not talking about medical marijuana any more, we’re talking about lifting prohibition altogether.

Who cares? Well, apparently some major websites do. And the way they care is by refusing to run ads supporting Proposition 19. Yes, you heard that right. Not for any amount of money!

Facebook, for starters. They recently forbade even displaying an image of a marijuana leaf in an ad. And it’s quite ironic that we have to link to Wired to report this story, because Wired belongs to Conde-Nast Media, which also owns Reddit.com… And guess who else won’t run a pro-Prop-19 ad?

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Michael Arrington Thinks That Reputation Isn’t Going To Matter Anymore

Of course, this sounds like both irony and wishful thinking. Arrington both rides a wave of reputation to the bank each month (Techcrunch), being the only technology news source regularly quoted by Reuters and Associated Press, and dies a little on the sword of reputation each night, with the ugly rumours about his behaviour, his controversy for conflict-of-interest situations, and his abominable accuracy record.

But anyway, in “Reputation is Dead“, he makes a case that since it will be possible to find dirt on anyone, then that will mean that dirt won’t matter anymore. That’s the web of Facebook, Twitter, your old blog, what-have-you preventing you from getting that next marketing job. The counter-argument is that everyone will need to buy reputation-insurance. Continue reading

Internet Marketing – Microsoft Can Now Sic The Law On Its Competitors

We’re really trying not to sound like an end-of-the-world conspiracy blog this week, but there’s just been so many stories of dirty dealings by giant web companies that its difficult to avoid. Now there’s new complaints against Google in Europe, by three companies, two of which have ties to Microsoft.

The Google spokes-lawyer responds: “They were a long-time AdSense partner of Google’s, with whom we always had a good relationship. However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao! … we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions.” Well, yeah, Microsoft does like its puppetry. Continue reading

Internet Marketing – A Blog Marketer’s Checklist

Setting up a blog to promote your marketing presence on the web is just half the battle. Once you get going, you have to keep going. But while you’re at it, be sure you aren’t just filling up space without attracting visitors. A few tips:

Fulfill the visitor’s expectations. – Posting regularly is important, as is keeping the content consistent. You want to draw the kind of audience who make best customers, and tailor your content that way.

Make the most of your traffic. – Social bookmarking icons, RSS feed icons within easy reach, and links to the rest of your site will help turn those one-time visitors into regulars.

Archive. – The worst thing you can do to a blog is make the past content difficult to access. Live Journal, we’re looking at YOU! Ditch the clumsy calendar and – Blogger.com, you too – maybe even the year-month-day tree structure too. Lists are your friend.

Watch the analytics. – Learn and adapt new strategies from watching the way visitors access your site. For instance, you might have a very popular image that appears in image search results. How about adding your website name to that image? Continue reading

Could September Finally Be Over Soon?

Once upon a time, the web was a frontier of exciting possibilities and intelligent conversation. Then America Online (AOL!) started up.

The influx of American kids logging in from Windows 3.1 machines completely swamped online culture, and it hasn’t recovered since. And long past the time when you thought AOL should have died, it keeps going, like a possessed Energizer Bunny.

Those of you who count on American customers for your web business, you know you have to allow for AOL users in your digital strategy. They still make up a tiny percentage of the web traffic!

Now Time-Warner is going to spin off AOL after having absorbed it 8 years ago. Amongst other ballast they’re dumping, they’re selling off… wait for it!… ICQ.

It takes a special kind of chutzpah to put a $300 million price tag on ICQ, in these days of Twitter hype. Yeah, sure, ICQ will come back any day now! But for a company that got its start as a game subscription service running on the Atari 2600, and has since survived not only the video game crash but the dot-com crash too, chutzpah is its middle name.

Blogging: Seven Dead Blog Tropes

Of course, every website owner with even a passing interest in search engine optimization has had the word “blog” pounded into them until they can’t take it anymore and started a blog. Now, when blogs were first starting up yonder ’bout a decade ago, these tropes were excusable. but now, many of the things that people were doing with them are now tired cliches. Check your blog to see if it’s suffering from any of those symptoms – if so, it might be time for a scraping!

1. Replying to every comment.
You are right that sometimes you want to engage your public. Appending more of your bright, witty banter to the tail of a good, solid gem of linkbait is the sensible thing, especially while you’re soaking up all this adoration. But when you’re responding to every single comment, even if it’s only as brief as “hey thanks!”, you’re saying two things: (1) You have nothing to do. You’re not that busy. Your whole life is this blog. (2) Your ego is so starved that you’re gobbling up every crumb of attention as if it were the last human interaction you’d ever get.

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Getting to Know a Niche Market

One of the prime goals for an Internet marketer who wants to market within a specific niche is to get to know that niche. A specific market demographic is likely to have a whole culture around it, and you run into trouble if you get the culture wrong when composing your marketing materials. Leather, metal, motorcycles, and lager will go over big with marketing to bikers, but will flop with selling needlepoint kits to grannies.

One of the most important demographics is the youth market. Billion-dollar advertising companies exhaust years of research into study groups of kids and young people aged 14 to 21, to find out what they listen to, what they eat, where they go, and what their current slang is.

By all means, it’s necessary to become a part of this culture if you intend to market to it. Your best bet is to join Twitter groups, social bookmarking sites, and mailing lists devoted to your target culture and then remain very quiet about it. Spend more time listening than you do talking. Every time you see an unfamiliar term, look it up in Wikipedia or some other source to get the origin of the phrase. Continue reading

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