by Francois Muscat | Oct 28, 2010 | Online Marketing
To get on Google’s first page for your keywords is not an easy task. By driving traffic to your website is only the first part of creating a top producing site. In internet marketing, to get good rankings on the search engines is the process of creating the best identity, solution and image for your target market.
To get good rankings on the search engines and to make sure you get maximum results from your rankings takes two types of positioning.
- Position for a top ranking Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Position to target the best buyers
Types of positioning
Search Engine Optimization: Anyone with a website wants to rank good on the search engine result pages. Being on the first page of the search results can make quite a huge difference in getting a constant flow of visitors to your website. The key is to select targeted keywords and keyword phrases that are specifically tied to core services and products that you offer.
Target the best buyers: Never try to sell your services to everyone or you will attract no one. Always focus on your best buyer. This will take some research to identify your ideal customer. Your best buyer should be interested in what you offer. What are they looking for? What answers are they seeking online? By compiling a list of answers to these two questions you will definitely get a better understanding of who you want to target.
Many people searching on Google can only focus on one thing at a time. If you present too many options, then they most likely won’t hear any of them. Keep it simple and make sure you can provide answers to the questions your target buyers are asking.
by Marianna Muscat | Oct 11, 2010 | Online Marketing
Internet marketing gurus can debate all day about what makes an online company so successful. Indeed, many strategies are subjective. There are, however, certain mistakes that we all agree MUST BE AVOIDED! Instead of banging on all the time about the keys to success! I’m going to tell you how NOT to fail!
Here are the top 10 internet marketing mistakes that you must avoid at all costs:
1. Having a slow-loading website
A web page shouldn’t take anymore than a few seconds to load. If people have to wait for our content to load, they will get aggravated. You definitely don’t want anyone’s first impression of your site to be agitation. Avoid this by ensuring all your images are below 100KB. (Ideally all images totalled should be under 100kb).
DO NOT have a website full of flash! It’s not flashy if all your audience sees is a buffering circle – 3 seconds and they’re gone……
2. Having a sloppy, haphazard website
Everything should be organised neatly. Your layout should have easy navigation. All of your pages should be interlinked. If somebody wants to find something on your site, they should be able to do so. Consider creating a sitemap, not only will it help your ranking in the search engines, it will guide people around your website.
Ensure you have a search function and make sure there are clear calls to action, where you want people to go, how they contact you, how they get more information etc. Sometimes when it comes to design – less is more!
3. Don’t forget to submit your site to search engines
This one seems like a no-brainer, yet a surprisingly large number of people neglect doing this. Ask your Internet Marketing Consultancy to assist with this or submit them manually Get your site out there! It’s no good happily filling it with content if no-one’s going to read it!
4. Failing to update your site or blog every single day
At the very least, you should update three or four times a week. The more original content your website has, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. Plus, consistent updates show dedication, which will give visitors a reason to return in the future. Look, people want some real bang for their buck these days. The key word here is VALUE!
You need to constantly be giving new, up to date, fresh content to your readers. Remember the web is incredibly competitive these days and if you’ve been really canny they’ve subscribed to your RSS and have a reader of up to date content hitting their screens daily. Now if Mr Jones is posting new interesting stuff daily and you only come up with something new once a month, it won’t be long before your feed is canned, at the very least completely ignored! This takes work!
5. Not giving Social Networking a try
Facebook has over 500 million customers and over 50% of them are active on a daily basis – that’s 250,000,000 people you could be getting your message in front of! That’s phenomenal! You Tube has 2 BILLION views a day – 24 hrs worth of video is uploaded every minute. I mean you’d be crazy not to include these in your marketing strategies! Be as creative as possible when making videos, images, content, software, etc.
Create great relationships with people and have friends and fans link your content through their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites. Put your videos up on You Tube and have friends give them two thumbs up! Also create a facebook fan page, it’s essential –
6. Spamming
There is no need to spam your site all over the internet. If it’s good, and you promote it properly, people will visit. Traffic will come inevitably if you know what you’re doing. Spamming your site and adding your URL in linkfarms could cause your site to be reported to your ISP and banned by all search engines!
If you think that popping onto high ranking blogs and adding a vague comment about nothing and including your link is good marketing, think again. The internet as I said in point 4, is all about value and content. You need to build trust and relationships to be truly successful.
7. Not building a list
Ok, so I’m back again to value and content, building relationships. Are you getting a common theme here? Your list is your business. It’s as simple as that. Without customers there is no business, so you MUST collect email addresses and build a list! Having a list of customers is the key to success on the internet!
You will be able to send out regular updates, newsletters, links to your blog, new videos you do, new information and….once they trust you and know that your main intention is to provide value and things that will help them, you can start to send promotional emails with your products or products you believe in, or create a membership site or run events, there are so many ways you can then go on to make money.
But the key is the quality of your relationships with a customer database, in other words your list.
8. Choosing the wrong products to promote
This is very simple – DO NOT SELL RUBBISH PRODUCTS! Just because commission rates are high, or the graphics are fancy, if you start farming out complete tosh to your trusted list, you will soon lose all credibility and no-one will buy from you anymore. Be selective and become known to only ever recommend products that you have used and proven their worth.
9. Not targeting your ads to the right demographics
I think maybe the title of this one should read, not knowing anything about your customers, because it’s not just about targeting your ads, it’s about targeting all of your marketing efforts, free or paid. Clearly not everybody is going to need what you’re promoting.
So make sure you’ve drilled down exactly who your customers are, sex, age, location, interests, desires, buying patterns, keywords etc. Then you can focus on ensuring you get your message directly under the right noses.
10. Failing to interact and network with others
This is HUGE! No man is an island. The power of collaboration is without doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies you can have. So, you must ACTIVELY promote your company. You need to post on forums, join social media communities, comment on blogs, send out press releases, and so forth.
Get to know consumers and other entrepreneurs. Treat consumers as individuals rather than just potential customers. Join in conversations and share tips with others. Join hands and do some marketing projects with other entrepreneurs in the same niche – 2 heads are always better than 1!
Avoid making these ten mistakes and I’m sure you will ultimately succeed at creating a fantastic internet marketing business!
by Marianna Muscat | Sep 20, 2010 | Online Marketing
Internet marketing gurus can debate all day about what makes an online company so successful.
Indeed, many strategies are subjective. There are, however, certain mistakes that we all agree MUST BE AVOIDED! Instead of banging on all the time about the keys to success! I’m going to tell you how NOT to fail!
Here are the top 10 internet marketing mistakes that you must avoid at all costs:
1. Having a slow-loading website
A web page shouldn’t take anymore than a few seconds to load. If people have to wait for our content to load, they will get aggravated. You definitely don’t want anyone’s first impression of your site to be agitation. Avoid this by ensuring all your images are below 100KB. (Ideally all images totalled should be under 100kb).
Sign up to Amazon S3 and get your videos hosted under cloudfront, after you’ve converted them from large file sizes down to the smallest you can manage without affecting the quality. DO NOT have a website full of flash! It’s not flashy if all your audience sees is a buffering circle – 3 seconds and they’re gone……Plus Google sees words and not pictures
2. Having a sloppy, haphazard website
Everything should be organized neatly. Your layout should have easy navigation. All of your pages should be interlinked. If somebody wants to find something on your site, they should be able to do so. Consider creating a site map, not only will it help your ranking in the search engines, it will guide people around your website.
Ensure you have a search function and make sure there are clear calls to action, where you want people to go, how they contact you, how they get more information etc. Sometimes when it comes to design – less is more!
3. Don’t forget to submit your site to search engines
This one seems like a no-brainer, yet a surprisingly large number of webmasters neglect doing this. Take the time to manually submit your website to Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Lycos, etc. (I didn’t do this for months – simply because I didn’t know I had to!) Get your site out there! It’s no good happily filling it with content if no-one’s going to read it!
4. Failing to update your site or blog every single day
At the very least, you should update three or four times a week. The more original content your website has, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. Plus, consistent updates show dedication, which will give visitors a reason to return in the future.
Look, people want some real bang for their buck these days. The key word here is VALUE! You need to constantly be giving new, up to date, fresh content to your readers.
Remember the web is incredibly competitive these days and if you’ve been really canny they’ve subscribed to your RSS and have a reader of up to date content hitting their screens daily.
Now if Mr Jones is posting new interesting stuff daily and you only come up with something new once a month, it won’t be long before your feed is canned, at the very least completely ignored! This takes work!
5. Not giving Social Networking a try
For so long I tried to ignore Facebook. I didn’t understand it and I thought it was a waste of time! Did you know that Facebook has over 500 million customers and over 50% of them are active on a daily basis – that’s 250,000,000 people you could be getting your message in front of! That’s phenomenal! You Tube has 2 BILLION views a day – 24 hrs worth of video is uploaded every minute.
I mean you’d be crazy not to include these in your marketing strategies! Be as creative as possible when making videos, images, content, software, etc. Create great relationships with people and have friends and fans link your content through their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites. Put your videos up on YouTube and have friends give them two thumbs up! Also create a Facebook fan page, it’s essential – but I’ll have to cover that in another post!
6. Spamming
There is no need to spam your site all over the internet. If it’s good, and you promote it properly, people will visit. Traffic will come inevitably if you know what you’re doing. Spamming your site and adding your URL in link farms could cause your site to be reported to your ISP and banned by all search engines!
If you think that popping onto high-ranking blogs and adding a vague comment about nothing and including your link is good marketing, think again. The internet as I said in point 4, is all about value and content. You need to build trust and relationships to be truly successful.
7. Not building a list
Ok, so I’m back again to value and content, building relationships. Are you getting a common theme here? Your list is your business. It’s as simple as that. Without customers there is no business, so you MUST collect email addresses and build a list! Having a list of customers is the key to success on the internet!
You will be able to send out regular updates, newsletters, links to your blog, new videos you do, new information and….once they trust you and know that your main intention is to provide value and things that will help them, you can start to send promotional emails with your products or products you believe in, or create a membership site or run events.
There are so many ways you can then go on to make money. But the key is the quality of your relationships with a customer database, in other words your list.
8. Choosing the wrong products to promote
This is very simple – DO NOT SELL RUBBISH PRODUCTS! Just because commission rates are high, or the graphics are fancy, if you start farming out complete trash to your trusted list, you will soon lose all credibility and no-one will buy from you anymore. Be selective and become known to only ever recommend products that you have used and proven their worth.
9. Not targeting your ads to the right demographics
I think maybe the title of this one should read, not knowing anything about your customers, because it’s not just about targeting your ads, it’s about targeting all of your marketing efforts, free or paid. Clearly not everybody is going to need what you’re promoting.
So make sure you’ve drilled down exactly who your customers are, sex, age, location, interests, desires, buying patterns, keywords etc. Then you can focus on ensuring you get your message directly under the right noses.
10. Failing to interact and network with others
This is HUGE! No man is an island. The power of collaboration is without doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies you can have. So, you must ACTIVELY promote your company. You need to post on forums, join social media communities, comment on blogs, send out press releases, and so forth.
Get to know consumers and other entrepreneurs. Treat consumers as individuals rather than just potential customers. Join in conversations and share tips with others. Join hands and do some marketing projects with other entrepreneurs in the same niche – 2 heads are always better than 1!
Avoid making these ten mistakes and I’m sure you will ultimately succeed at creating a fantastic internet marketing business!
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 7, 2010 | Online Marketing
Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Did you know that you can allow the visitors of your website or blog to share your content with others?
Why do you want to share your online content?
By sharing the content found on your blog or website is quite different from someone taking your content without your permission and then brand it in their own name and re publishing it. By having simple content sharing tools such as social bookmarking buttons on your blog or website, your company’s byline and branding will remain intact with a link to the original content source – your website or blog.
The most common way websites have been sharing content in the past is through an easy “email this” to a friend function on the content where you can click the email sharing button or link and the content or blog post can be emailed to anyone.
By encouraging your readers to share your content with others is a really powerful way to drive targeted traffic to extend your brand and to drive traffic to your website or blog.
Find below a couple of tips on sharing your online content.
- Search and register on content sharing Web 2.0 channels. There’s many free ones available. These systems provides easy ways to share your content with their members as well as to the search engines.
- If you own a blog, there’s many third-party plugins available for free that you can install that automatically places content sharing buttons (social bookmarking) on your blog posts with little or no modification from your side at all. Have a look at Add This and ShareThis that provides an easy way to add sharing buttons on your website or blog.
- Not all of your content will make sense to share. Content that you don’t want to share should not be on the internet (public view) open to anyone to read. If you don’t want people to have access to some of your content, keep these content items behind a restricted password section. Content worth sharing is anything that others can use and isn’t proprietary to your company, yourself but it has a more universal appeal.
- Create content that others will find useful. You can keep track of what content is shared the most from your website or blog. This will also give you an indication of what your readers find interesting. Always think of ways to build on the content that you have provided or on providing additional information.
- If a certain type of content you have provided works and it is shares quite often, produce more of the same content to achieve some of your business goals.
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 30, 2010 | Online Marketing
Aligning sales and marketing is an imperative in today’s world of the empowered buyer.
There has been much written about aligning around leads…but this is only part of the issue and will lead to trouble down the road if you don’t address the whole issue. These five steps will help marketers get on the road to success in the relationship with sales.
Step 1: Tell ‘Em What You’re Going To Do
Sales needs to understand marketing plans and forecast so expectations are set correctly on the type of marketing activities you will be conducting and the target audiences being selected to pursue. There needs to be a common understanding of the volume of activity and how they can participate and even initiate marketing activities to drive business and opportunities at outlet or branch level.
Without an understanding of your marketing goals and plans, sales will not be able to put together meaningful territory plans. We all know that marketing doesn’t initiate all sales opportunities. Without the forecast and plans, sales will not know how much is expected from their own direct and partner efforts.
Step 2: Make Sales a Part of Marketing
The roles are blurring as marketing communicates deep into the prospect pipeline and sales should be returning prospects for further nurturing campaigns. This can be a disaster if sales and marketing collide and fall over each other, or it can be a powerful combination if your sales team is empowered to work within the bounds of the marketing plans.
This starts with collaborative planning by involving sales personnel in your go-to-market campaign development process. Then, you need to define the guidelines for sales initiating marketing communications and provide a means for sales to return a prospect to marketing for further nurturing. You need to give sales control over how you message to prospects in the sales pipeline and your existing customers by allowing them to select their preferences from a selection of marketing messages.
Step 3: Show Them What You Are Doing
We discussed the importance of providing visibility to plans and forecasts. You need to provide visibility to a dynamic calendar of activities in marketing. As we all know, marketing’s calendar is constantly changing…new things get added, things get dropped and things move.
Your sales team needs an easy way to access the calendar so they know when email campaigns drop, when events are scheduled and when road shows or experiential marketing is taking place. In addition, you should add your sales team to the seed list for your campaigns.
This can serve two functions. First, they can provide feedback on the campaign delivery and content and receiving the campaign will serve as an alert that it is going out to their prospects and customers. They are a key conduit for successful marketing events and they can provide important follow up to campaigns sent to prospects in the pipeline or existing customers.
Step 4: Love ‘Em With Leads
We said defining lead hand-off and quality was not enough….but it is definitely important and required. The first element is to define what attributes you want to track on a lead. BANT (Budget, Activity, Need and Time-line) are tried and true factors to start with. You will also likely have contact attributes such as title, monthly revenue or industry.
Finally, don’t miss the critical behavior category. You should score and factor in their connections with you (where they have reached out to you) such as web traffic on your properties, online and live event attendance, downloads of marketing materials, or viewing videos. Their behavior not only indicates interest, it indicates where they are in the buying cycle (awareness, education, evaluation, purchase for example.)
Once you agree on attributes, you need to agree on what level of quality is sufficient to hand the lead to sales. Do they need all attributes to be known or are some of them sufficient. This varies by the product(s) you are selling, the staffing of marketing versus sales, whether you have telemarketing or not, and the culture of the company.
These discussions will drive a lead score plan that gives different points to the attributes and behaviors of your prospects. Lead scoring can be structured simply with one set of rules that are applied to all prospects or your business may be more complex requiring different lead scoring rule sets for different types of prospects based on product line interest, geography or even buying stage. Regardless, you need to spend time in this definition and then allow for updates and changes as you learn how your plan works and capacity changes.
But don’t just stop at setting up your lead scoring structure and hand-off. Once you have this in place, you need a communication vehicle to keep your sales team informed as prospects continue to interact with you in later stages of the buying cycle. Provide alerts when an individual or company is on one of your web properties.
Provide visibility of online and offline activity to your sales team directly in their SFA tool so they have it in the context of where they go to manage contacts, accounts and opportunities. Keep them informed of new behavior that could be the trigger to driving the deal to a close.
Use the intelligence you gain about your prospects (their “digital profile”) to tailor your outbound messaging for newsletters or announcements. Today’s segmentation tools can use these attributes to segment your lists and also use this same information to dynamically build your emails, landing pages and microsites so they provide relevant information to your prospects and customers. This will significantly improve response rates and drive engagement that will lead to faster movement through the pipeline.
Step 5: Tell ‘Em What You Did
Communicate results so there is a common understanding of how well something worked versus a micro view from each sales rep. Sales will be looking for instant gratification so will only focus on the immediate opportunities that spring from a campaign or event. They also lose sight of the volume of activity that is happening to nurture leads to the right point.
Get agreement on the metrics sales wants to see and then make sure you add in metrics that are important to your team as well so they see the whole picture. Use the connection between your integrated marketing solution and your sales automation tools to provide visibility into the lead flow from marketing through the sales pipeline.
Show them how your leads are moving through the pipeline at each stage and include cost per lead so you can work as a team to improve your pipeline and drive more value.As a team, you want to drive toward improving your lead efficiency at each stage so you can lower your cost per lead overall.
Visibility to the leads at each stage can identify friction in the system and highlight opportunities for new or different messaging and tools. Good reporting and easy access to these reports will go a long way to keeping sales and marketing on the same page. A true understanding of the successes also builds their confidence in the marketing team for future effort.
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 27, 2010 | Online Marketing
Coping in a recession allows for a whole new marketing tool set
Rather then sticking our heads in the sand and denying that it exists despite numerous stories of negative growth I say lets gear our businesses to be lean, mean and actively seek marketing channels that not only work for your business but provide measurable ROI opportunities.
The financial and credit markets are predictors of the future
Any way you want to measure it, 2010/2011 will be a year of recession, possibly a big one. Does this mean go and hideout in a bunker until the clouds dissipate? If you do, this will be a mistake which you will regret for a very long time.
Tough times call for action, not passivity. It calls for greater precision and targeting for the most efficient and ROI-driven strategies to maintain and improve your sales and profits. Yes, I said improve, even in a recession. The following from Emarketer was just released showing the estimates of online advertising spending growth: The doom and gloom crowd don’t believe these numbers and therefore won’t share them with you as we are here.
According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide.
91% are using online advertising, and over one-half indicate that their companies plan to maintain or exceed current levels where possible. Even more telling, 55% of marketers said they are cutting expenditures on traditional media, precisely in order to increase funding for online efforts.
Why is this?
Why do marketing experts believe that shifting precious marketing budgets online and taking away from the traditional media is the way to go? It all comes down to results.
Here are the key reasons for the phenomenon:
1. The buyer is finding your website as a result of their personal initiative; all at a time and place of their choosing. Traditional media reach less than . 05% of their target market at enormous cost; this is the quintessential example of inefficiency and waste and cannot be tolerated by all those on a tight marketing budget.
2. The web is, more than anything else, an instrument of measurement. Therefore it is vastly more measurable and accountable than traditional methods.
3. The web is clearly more targeted and provides us much granularity as the buyer or the seller desires. The information is all there and always available.
4. The web is just simply gaining viewer time. Traditional media commercials are ignored or fast-forwarded using new technology. When online, viewers are in buyer mode when searching for a product or service; they have the confidence that the web / Google search will lead them to the right information, the right purchase at the right price.
5. Traditional media provide you only the information they want you to know in the time or space they are allowed. The web provides no barrier; buyers can check out products, prices, terms and conditions. They can use the social media and other supportive tools to gain the confidence and peace of mind they need before making a buying decision.
So here is what you need to do to overcome the challenge of recession:
- Improve your Internet Marketing Strategy. This includes many factors: a. Hire a professional Internet Marketing Company to partner with
- Generate a game plan to generate targeted SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Sponsored Search or PPC (Pay per Click).
- Make a major commitment to content and more content with the company you select. Content is life-blood of quality SEO results.
- Improve your website to optimize conversions as well.
- Start e-publishing a monthly newsletter for your existing clientele. Keep your name in front of your customers and new prospects that sign up through the sign-up on your website.
- Start writing a blog full of interesting and topical information around your industry or service offering and integrate it into a social media strategy that your Internet Marketing Consultant can assist you with.
Do all of these things and more and you will be found by precisely those people who are seeking your products and services.
