Tag: marketing strategy

Internet Marketing: How the pieces fit together

Imagine the pieces of the Internet as a series of gears and cogs in a complex and constantly turning engine. Now imagine that the largest, most powerful gear in the engine is your website. What do we find there?

Imagine the pieces of the Internet as a series of
gears and cogs in a complex and constantly
turning engine.

Now imagine that the largest,
most powerful gear in the engine is your
website.

What do we find there?

What we should find…is Content:

• Information that tells your customer how your product or service helps them solve a problem or fulfill a need

• This is where you sell yourself to the public. This is your message.

• Despite how important your offerings may be to your audience, they won’t be likely to find your content unless you mesh the gears of your website with other channels of communication.

Blogs

• This is where you show off your expertise.

• Show people that you’re the “Subject Matter Expert”.

• Blogging sites include: BlogSpot, blogger & more.

• 250 million bloggers post on-line regularly

Social Media

• Where you create and build relationships

Popular Sites:

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Foursquare

• YouTube

• LinkedIn

Newsletters

• Where you tell your customers about new things happening within the company

• Provide little tidbits on how to use your product or services,

• Or write anything else you think they want to hear about.

Popular Email sites:

• Vertical Response

• Constant Contact

• Mail Chimp

Articles and PR Releases

• Another great way to let people know that you’re relevant and continue to add value to your offerings.

• Google has new restrictions on re-using content

Article Sites:

• Ezine

• Squidoo

Video

• The next best thing to a personal meeting.

• If a picture is worth a thousand words,

• Then video is far more valuable than static text on a web page.

• Why tell when you can show?

Popular Video hosting sites

• YouTube

• MetaCafe

• Hula

• Daily Motion

SEO

• Search engine optimization

• Makes your website rank more highly for the content your audience is searching for.

• Targeted Keywords your audience will use to find you.

• Backlinks from other relevant websites

• It takes more than keywords to reach page one ranking.

SEM/PPC

• Search Engine Marketing

• Pay-Per-Click is advertising that helps your audience find you quicker.

• PPC helps you control your destiny in an internet crowded with competition.

• You can control how much you spend

CONTENT

• So, it’s all about the message

• Content is King

• Deliver it so that it attracts people to your website.

• Your Internet marketing efforts should answer the question: “Why should I do business with you and not the other guy?”

Internet Map

Part 2 – Why you and not the other guy?

Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #10

Online Video – Reach new audiences by posting on video-sharing sites. The best videos tend to be short, about 3 minutes long, and have an offer, such as a free copy of a report or a product discount, to motivate viewers to take action. MobileDemand is one of many small businesses with a YouTube channel to help spread company news and information. Just watching their video made me want to buy one of their tablets.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions

Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #6

Group Buying – Connect with new customers through programs that offer multiple buyers collective purchasing deals. There are many popular group buying sites available to use. But be prepared to offer your products at significant discounts. While you can set the number of buyers required to sell at certain levels, if you don’t sell anything the site could remove you as a vendor.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions

Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #5

Geotargeting – Geotargeting simply means advertising to prospects in specific locations – which could be very useful, for example, if you sell dresses only in Dallas. One way to get started is to create a listing on Google Places. Geo targeting in internet marketing is the method of determining the geographic physical location of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on their location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP or other criteria. The example of the dress shop in Dallas can be extended further to other retailers such as car dealers who only want shoppers from their area to see their web pages.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions

Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #4

Display Ads – You’ve probably seen the dancing aliens; that’s a display or banner ad. Do-it-yorself display ad builders, including Google Adwords display ad builder can help design your ad. You can also distribute your display ad via ad networks and ad management systems. While some would deride the dancing aliens saying its similar to the dancing cigarette pack from the 50’s, it still attracts attention.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions

Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #3

Contextual Ads – Contextual advertising takes display ads to the next level, by placing them on sites related to your offerings; for example, if you sell sporting goods, your ad may perform better on sports-related sites. Services are available that automatically distribute ads to sites based on the content of those sites.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions

Things to Keep in Mind When Doing Keyword Research to Attract Customers

Many people can create a long list of the top keywords manually But the question is: are these the right keywords for your business? You have to choose carefully the terms you are going to use to attract customers and to describe your business to them so they buy. Remember, you only have one shot at this, best to get it right the first time.

Keywords are those words that you want to use in your content that your targeted market uses to find you in a Google search. You want to choose the terms which rank well but have a low competitor rate in the search engines because these are the terms that buyers use. General terms attract tire kickers, specific targeted terms attract buyers.

Many small businesses cannot compete in the world of high competition general search terms for a variety of reasons including being new to the Internet, little time to develop needed content to create links back to their website to name a few. Thus, it is very important to do your research carefully so that the keywords you choose to use in your website and other web content will actually produce the desired result.

You can come up with a list of possible words to use using a number of free keyword suggestion tools available on the internet. You can choose to use one keyword or multiple word keywords and you can get traffic from these words, but these are the expensive highly competitive keywords that will require much time and work to produce results.

Long tail keyword phrases are those terms I spoke of earlier which can effectively target your buying customers. Research will show you that prospects will likely type in these multiple word phrases giving you more and better chances of getting quality ready to buy customers to your site. These people have spent time looking for you and are interested in what you do.

The question is: Are you ready to tell them why you and not the other guy?

There are 4 things you need to do that will make your keyword research more:

  • First: Find out the needs of your prospective customers. This information will make your online marketing campaign successful.
  • Know what you’re about. Define your company, its products/services and find those keywords that are suitable to your mission.
  • From your list of keyword phrases select those that you think are the most fitting and effective words. Only then will your targeting efforts become more specific.
  • Consider your competition when doing your keyword research competition. Your ability to compete will also depend on what keywords you used in comparison to your competitors.

Keep in mind that driving traffic to your website using SEO keyword research is only part of the process.  Getting traffic to your website is only part of the battle. Upon arriving you have to convince.  More on that later.

Yellowbird Marketing Solutions