by Francois Muscat | Feb 23, 2010 | Online Marketing
Squidoo is a popular website with social media characteristics where members (sign up is free) can create pages about any topic. This is an excellent way to get additional exposure for your services, products, brand, blog or website. Squidoo is one of those free alternatives that should be used along with a website and a blog.
The biggest challenge small companies face is “getting the word out” and to make them selves known to the world. With Squidoo it is possible! Advetising and marketing can get expensive. Turning to various forms and channels of social media is an excellent and cost affective alternative. You can build trust and credibility by building lasting relationships with social media but it does take time and dedication to get optimal results.
A short background about Squidoo: It was developed by Seth Godin with the idea that nearly everyone is an expert on something. Squidoo allows people to provide information, voice their opinion or recommend products and services that they like. The members of Squidoo are called “Lensmasters” and the pages they create are called “Lenses”.
For a “Lens” to be effective it needs to focus on a single topic and should provide valuable information that your targeted readers/customer would find useful.
Find a couple of tips below for creating and optimizing your Squidoo Lens to get the best results from one.
- Always focus on a single topic and subject that would be interesting to targeted users.
- Visit the popular lenses on Squidoo and research how these Lenses present their information and tell their story.
- Choose keywords and keyword phrases carefully. Research the keyword phrases that people are searching for and that describes your subject.
- Be sure to make your content informative and unique. Once again – uniqueness is the key! Write your content on something that people would like to read and even show their friends.
- Bookmark your new lens with popular social bookmarking websites to get the word out about your new “Lens”. Bookmarking and linking will help promoting your lens and move it up in the rankings on Squidoo, bringing you even more traffic.
- Use StumbleUpon and Digg to give it a thumbs up.
- Blog about your “Lens” and link to it.
Squidoo is a way for companies to improve their brand and to reach new audiences. To get the best results from Squidoo, use it together with your blog or website.
Leave a comment below or contact us if you require more information regarding Squidoo or internet marketing.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 12, 2010 | Online Marketing
These days, for many businesses, offline and online times are tough. People are looking for value and ways to eliminate the unnecessary. Online marketing is a way to reach online communities via your website and to convert prospects into buyers. All you need to do is to make sure that your services or products is considered necessary. You also need to market smarter during hard times.
Online marketing is an effective and low cost way to increase your sales. Find below a couple of tips on how you can increase your sales online during a recession.
Call to Action
When new visitors arrive to your website, there needs to be a clear path to action. This always needs to be visible on the home page and should be clear to the visitor in the first few seconds of arrival. Your visitors should always know what your website is about and what steps to do next.
Pay Per Click
Well written pay per click advertising campaigns can rapidly increase your sales. To do this, increase your advertising budget and target your advertisements around geographical or other demographics. Create your advertisements around each of your specific products and then make sure the advertisement delivers the visitor to the specific page where you describe the product with a clear CTA (call to action) to make sure the visitor takes an action.
Blog Marketing
This is a powerful marketing tool and I believe every business should have one. With a blog you can broadcast your marketing messages to every corner of the world thanks to RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and other Web 2.0 tools. Your blog can also build trust and credibility and encourage conversation with your targeted customer. People will buy from businesses that they trust.
You can use your blog to strengthen your relationships, build your brand, develop a loyal readership and to get new customers. The key to effective blogging is to regularly write interesting original content that your targeted customer will be interested in. A major benefit of blogging is that it can dramatically improve your search engine rankings of your website.
Social Networking
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to name but a few are great Social Networking websites and tools where you can engage with other people that shares the same interests. Social Media Marketing is powerful and if done correctly, can increase visibility to your products and services drastically.
There are hundreds of social networking sites out there; many are focused around a topic, interest or particular group. Find one that your targeted customer is active in and participate yourself. This will envolve some research from your side to be done.
Stay in touch
Marketing to your past customers can also be a quick way to increase business leads and sales. Email marketing can keep them coming back to purchase other products. In most businesses, 80% of the sales come from 20% of the customers. Stay in touch with your biggest customers on a regular basis. You aren’t trying to sell anything, you are just touching bases. You will be surprised on how much more business can come from this.
Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding online marketing.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 3, 2010 | Online Marketing
In the last couple of years, almost everything has changed in marketing. Traditional marketing with print yellow pages and newspapers is no longer effective. Yet most small companies have failed to convert to website and internet marketing according to a study done by Webvisible and Nielson in 2009.
- 63% of small business owners and consumers turns to the web for information about local companies.
- Only 44% of small business have their own website.
- Businesses that have a website spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.
This study shows clearly the need for small businesses to establish themselves online, yet 56% of them aren’t. Why do most small businesses fail to establish and market themselves online? What could the reason be for holding them back?
Busy
Small business owners don’t have the time to focus on learning this method (online) of marketing. Most of the time they spend their entire day to keep the business running. After all they are the expert in their field and business.
Skills
SEO and internet marketing is a new technology for many business owners. Trends and changes on the web happens at light speed. Most younger business owners and employees have an advantage here because they have been around technology and computers for most of their lives.
Confusion
There is so much information, opinions and misinformation out there. How can inexperienced novices succeed when the experts can’t agree? It is sometimes hard to get a grasp on things.
Fear
Usually people are afraid of what they don’t understand. Afraid of using a unfamiliar technology and presenting a poor image. Afraid of being taken advantage of. It can be tough jumping in when you don’t know the rules.
What can these small businesses do? As a business owner you don’t need to become a Internet Marketing Expert. The basic marketing principals are the same ones that have worked for decades.
These principals are just applied to a new technology. To start, lean the basics and how the strategies work. Hire someone to do the technical work. Let them explain in detail what will be done.
Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding internet marketing.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 2, 2010 | Online Marketing
Most online business have one common need and that is to get more targeted traffic to their website. More traffic = more sales and business leads. The web is also one of the primary advertising mediums for most home based businesses.
You might have a great looking website with all the bells and whistles, but without targeted traffic and interested visitors, the best looking website is useless. I’ll say that again – useless.
The best answer is to do two things.
- Optimize your website to be search engine friendly (SEO – on page ).
- Optimize and use a blog with it’s RSS (real simple syndication) links.
By using Search Engine Optimization combined with Blog Marketing (Social Media Marketing), you will be able to get good rankings on Google and this will equal to more targeted traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO can improve the volume of quality traffic to your website or online profile. Selecting keyword phrases that your targeted customers will actually use are the foundation for Search Engine Optimization. This is the first step that will ultimately determine if SEO will turn into online sales or business leads.
I’m not talking about the keywords in your Meta content but about the keywords and keyword phrases found in the content of your website.
Make sure that your keywords and content is always relevant. To have a baseline, assign no more than four keyword phrases to each page you want to optimize.
On page Search Engine Optimization requires text that the search engines can index – content is king. Use your keyword phrases 1-2 times each in the top 25% of the body text. You can also use the keyword phrases in the links, headings and any bulleted lists of your website.
Blog Marketing
To have a separate blog that links (link-bait) back to your website can quickly produce valuable links that the search engines will quickly recognise. You don’t have to set-up your blog on a separate domain, rather create a sub-domain for it eg http://blog.yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com/blog.
Using your targeted keywords as a guide, write a minimum of 3 blog postings each week. Each posting should be between 250-500 words in length. Use your keyword phrases in each blog posting title and in the text of the posting. Be sure to link back to the most relevant page on your website with the keywords you have selected. The search engines will quickly detect these links and each link will help your rankings.
These methods I have just explained is a combination of on page Search Engine Optimization together with Blog Marketing. This could be more powerful to increase targeted traffic to your website than doing either individually.
Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization or Blog Marketing.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 28, 2010 | Online Marketing
Targeting your message to the right audience is the key to growing your readership and at the same time reaching interested people. By directing and targeting your message to the people most interested will greatly increase the number of readers that will actually read your website or blog and respond. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is true.
Targeting your audience is a form of online marketing.
I always ask my clients who their targeted market is. Many times I get the response of “everyone”. They are actually saying “I don’t want to exclude anyone, because they might be interested”. The sad truth is that they will spend much more money and reach fewer interested people without targeting. People naturally want to read something that is meant for them.
The two most important parts of targeting is based on demographics and attitudes.
Attitudes
These are the psychological or personality factors. What is the target market’s attitude regarding the company’s product? How do they arrive at the purchase decision? These include price, fashion, status, latest technology, etc.
Demographics
This describes who your customer or audience is. This includes things such as age, gender, occupation, education level, lifestyle, nationality, etc.
By knowing your audience, you can write in a way that catches their attention and draws them in. This is how you increase the interest in and conversion rate for a website.
Let’s look at an example:
Price Shopper: There are many people in this world that shop based on price alone. Their attention will be grabbed by special deals, discounts and sales. They need to see a price related call-to-action. They need to see your special offer the second they arrive or they will wander off in search of a better deal. They will sign up for newsletters that announce sales. Even the design of the website should be simple and use bright active colors. This works well for products such as cell phones, printer cartridges, etc.
What ever your message, your product or service, it will be best received by those that are already interested. If you write in a way that is directed to your targeted audience, you will get more readers and more results.
Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding online marketing.
by Marelise da Silva | Jan 18, 2010 | Online Marketing
Spam in all its forms is a costly problem to any business. Spam can be found everywhere on the internet. Spam is considered to be unsolicited junk messages that are usually designed to sell or promote something (Viagra sounds familiar?). Spamming can mean using unethical tactics to get high search engine rankings. Spam continues to plague the Internet in the forms of spam blogs (splogs), email spam and comment spam.
Spam according to Wikipedia
Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networking spam, and file sharing network spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)
Email Spam
Email spam is a time waster to any business. Most businesses runs extensive filtering software to eliminate spam email before it arrives. Spam problems have made traditional email newsletters much less effective. They either don’t make it through to recipients or people are overwhelmed with spam and don’t read them.
Blog Marketing is now a much more effective way of reaching and communicating with your audience. They can either find you thru searching or subscribe for delivery by email or their feed readers.
Splogs (Spam Blogs)
Spam blogs or splogs, automatically extract information from RSS (Real Simple Synidation) feeds and re-publish the posting. These are low-cost automated sites that usually make their money by getting viewers to click on ads on the splog site. This damages the original blog poster by stealing content and they are a problem to blog readers because they contain random links and content that turn out to be junk and a waste of time to visit.
Comment Spam
Comment spam is a major problem like email spam where automated bots place promotional comments on random blogs in an effort to promote a product, service or website. Much like email spam, spam filters remove a high percentage of this nuisance.
Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Filters, blacklists and penalties from the search engines help keep this in check, but these are still major issues we must deal with.
