Every profession and trade works best with specific tools. Chefs need a good set of knives and various kitchen gadgets. Accountants need accounting and bookkeeping software. Every profession or trade has a key set of tools, and working on the Web requires its own set of tools. People who want to advertise or market on the Web need to use the right tools for the job, just like everyone else.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is a very popular online marketing tool. Email marketing works just like traditional mail marketing, except the product is delivered directly to your client’s email inbox. Email marketing can get unwieldy without the right tools. Use an email marketing program, such as Constant Contact, to manage your email marketing campaign. Tools like Constant Contact enable you to create custom, branded templates, create and manage email lists, and track your results to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Web Tracking Tools

In order to effectively judge the success of your online marketing campaigns, you need to utilize Web analytics tools that provide you with detailed results. Google Analytics is one option for measuring your website’s performance, and Google Analytics conveniently integrates with Google AdWords to evaluate the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. You can also use third-party tracking tools, such as Mint.

SEO Tools

SEO tools run the gamut from HTML checkers to keyword search tools to spider simulators, and everything in between. For simple SEO, you can use keyword search tools yourself to generate high-converting keywords for your niche. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a free tool that can help you select appropriate primary and alternate keywords. If you want a more comprehensive range of SEO tools, SEO Chat has a great selection of SEO tools to cover practically every SEO need. SEO Chat’s tools include SEO calculators, page rank checkers, ROI calculators, and a range of other tools to enable you to tweak every aspect of your site’s SEO.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a fairly new trend, but one that’s growing exponentially. Businesses can utilize existing social media platforms as a valuable advertising and marketing tool. I’m writing a series of articles on effectively utilizing social media marketing, which includes an overview of social media marketing as well as individual articles geared toward how to utilize specific platforms. You can utilize various aggregators and plugins to integrate your social media marketing with existing marketing campaigns and platforms.

Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content is a way for you to communicate directly with your clients. Interactive content includes things like turning comments into content, as well as things like featuring multimedia content on your website. Video and audio are far more valuable than simple text content, and provide another reason for your readers to visit your website. In online marketing, qualified traffic is the key to conversion, so featuring interactive content on your website gets you one step closer to improving your business.

SEO begins with keywords. Google’s free AdWords: Keyword Tool can help you find the right keywords to drive traffic to your page. By using primary and alternate keywords in the right places in your content, you can capitalize on the searches people conduct on keyword phrases related to your content. Not sure how to use a keyword tool to generate keywords for your SEO? Google’s AdWords: Keyword Tool is simple and easy to use.

Go to Google’s AdWords: Keyword Tool

You don’t have to have an AdWords account to use Google’s keyword tool. Simply go here to access the keyword tool, and you’ll see the form where you have various options to generate keywords.

Generate Keywords from Descriptive Words or Phrases

The default selection on the keyword tool is to generate keywords from descriptive words or phrases. You simply type in the word or phrase; one per line. Use phrases related to your article idea: for example, for a real-estate related article, your keyword search box might include:

• Real estate
• Home buying
• Home sales
• Selling a home
• Buying a home
• Real estate Atlanta, GA
• Home mortgage

Or any other words or phrases related to the content of your page. Then, type the validation characters from the validation image in the designated box, and click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button.

When you click the button, Google’s keyword tool generates a list of keywords related to the terms entered, and a second list of additional terms to consider. The search summary gives you two columns of results; local search volume for the preceding month, and global search volume. You can then choose keywords with a high search volume, niche keywords with a relatively high search volume, or keywords with low advertiser competition, depending on your goal. By using keywords from both the primary keyword list and the alternate keyword list, you can widen your search results and potentially increase the number of people who can easily find your page.

Generate Keywords from Website Content

The second option when using Google’s keyword search tool is to generate keywords from website content. You can enter the URL of an existing website, which the Google keywords tool analyzes and then suggests keywords based on your copy. For example, when I enter my own website URL, I get keyword results related to: copy writing, a copywriter, copywriting, writing, copywriter, copy, writer, freelance, writers, editor, copywriters, and miscellaneous keywords. In theory, I could use these keyword search results to optimize my website for popular keyword searches and thereby increase the number of people who click through to my website.

How to Use SEO-Friendly Keywords on Your Website

Once you have the keywords related to your niche or website, select specific keywords for optimization, depending on your needs. If you simply want to capitalize on popular keyword searches in order to increase the potential of readers finding your website, select the most popular keywords for your SEO. However, keep in mind that these popular keywords are typically highly competitive (as indicated by the advertising competition bar on the page) and your page might come up very low in the results on popular keywords.

More useful is selecting a niche keyword and pairing it with a popular keyword, or optimizing your page to appeal specifically to the niche. If you want conversion, appealing to the appropriate niche is more likely to land you qualified leads. Concentrating on the widest possible search range brings you leads, but they might not necessarily be qualified. The ideal combination for good SEO is to pair a popular keyword search with a niche keyword for optimal results.

Today it’s time to talk about how to leverage Twitter social networking for your business. This article is Part 3 in a monthly series I’m writing about effectively utilizing social networking for your business. For the previous installments, check out:

How to Leverage Social Networking for Your Business: Part 2 – Facebook

How to Leverage Social Networking for Your Business: Part 1

Since posting Part 1 of this series, where I mentioned that Twitter hasn’t released information about its user base, I’ve found references to indicate that Twitter has grown from 6 million users in February 2009 to over 28 million users in February 2010. This is an unprecedented growth rate, and Twitter is now a prime social networking tool you can use to reach millions of users with a relatively simple, inexpensive marketing campaign.

Why to Pursue Social Networking for Your Business Through Twitter

Twitter provides you an ready-made platform through which to interact with your readers and customers. Twitter is useful from a social networking standpoint in that you can do many of the same things as you can with Facebook, but due to the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, it’s more appropriate for discussion and interaction. Maintaining a Twitter account gives people a direct way to contact you immediately, instead of having to go to your website and type a lengthy email or go through other contact channels. Twitter also provides a great way for you to update followers and generate traffic to your website.

Grow Customers Virally Through Twitter

One of the biggest benefits of using Twitter is the opportunity to grow customers virally through Twitter. When you post updates to Twitter, your followers can click a simple button to ‘Re-Tweet’ your content. This means they can easily and quickly share your updates with all of their friends, and their friends – on and on. You can easily grow your customer base by dozens, hundreds or thousands of people with a few well-placed Tweets. In fact, if your Tweets get picked up by one of the many celebrities using Twitter, your content could reach over a million people.

Link Your Profile to Your Website

Twitter provides very basic ways of interacting with your readers. On your profile itself, you have your Twitter name, a picture, a link to your website and a 140-character biography. Use your profile to link to your website, because readers won’t be able to find out much about your business from your Twitter profile itself.

Choose a name consistent with your business. For example, in my Facebook article, I did a case study on a local business called Formaggio Kitchen; their Twitter username is Formaggio. Keep your Twitter username relatively short and easy to find. Every time users Re-Tweet your content, your name counts as part of your 140-character limit, so part of your content may get cut off if you have a long username or post at your 140-character limit.

Initiate Discussion

One of the best ways in which Twitter can serve your business is to use Twitter to initiate discussion. You can elicit feedback from your clients via Twitter, or even just chat and trade messages with your clients via Twitter. If you want to widen your metaphorical net, offer a really good promotion or introduce a controversial topic for discussion. This makes people more likely to re-Tweet your content and spread your Twitter ID – and therefore your business – to more friends. At the very least, you can use Twitter to get feedback about your business and services; and at best, you can use Twitter to discuss new potential offerings or item features so you can improve your product or services.

Share Information with Your Followers

Another way to get your name out via Twitter and get people following your posts is to share information with your potential clients via Twitter. Share early updates with your followers, with links to press releases or new product information. Or discuss special offerings, company downtime or anything that is relevant for your readers to know. By sharing valuable information, you’re more likely to induce people to follow you via Twitter, and are more likely to have those people visit your Website when they’re ready to use your services or buy your product. You can also use Twitter to share information about upcoming events and drive traffic to your site.

Manage the Perception of Your Company

Another valuable aspect of using Twitter for your social networking campaign is that it provides you with a ready-made tool to manage the perception of your company. For example, you could use Twitter to respond to customer concerns or feedback. Or you can simply portray a personable, friendly person via your Twitter account – adding an element of humanity to your business.

For example, Southwest Airlines reached out to actor Kevin Smith via Twitter a few weeks ago when he had an unfortunate incident on their flight. Southwest used Twitter to quickly respond to Smith’s concerns, and it gave them the ability to show clients “Look – we responded to this man’s concerns right away.” In that particular case, the Twitter contact didn’t resolve the issue, but it was one outreach tool that the company could utilize to manage perceptions of the company.

Use Special Offers to Gain Followers and Mentions

If you want to build followers on Twitter, you have to give them a reason to mention or re-Tweet your content. One effective way to quickly get the word out about your business is to use special offers to build followers and mentions. Some companies offer giveaways to people who re-Tweet or mention the company name in Twitter posts on a certain day, or during a certain time frame.

For example, one company held a drawing to give away a free Mac laptop to users who mentioned their business name anytime during a specific week. Users could mention the company once per day for a chance to enter the drawing that day. Hundreds of users mentioned the company every single day, which drove more people to research the company and enter the contest; and this company gained thousands of mentions during the course of that week.

Celebrity Twitter Users

Twitter is somewhat unusual in that it has introduced a way for ordinary people to interact with celebrities. Some celebrity Twitter users have over a million followers on Twitter. When a celebrity on Twitter mentions something, potentially over a million people could see that mention. Some celebrity Twitter users have been known to ‘break’ websites by sending too much traffic when they Tweet content. Wil Wheaton, for example, has over 1.5 million followers, and has repeatedly ‘broken’ websites when he has posted links to T-shirts or interesting items he’s found on the Web. Imagine getting 1.5 million people to your website. This is the power that celebrity Twitter users wield.

Conversely, that power can also turn to power to hurt your reputation. Kevin Smith, for example, had around 1.5 million followers when he Tweeted about a negative experience he had with Southwest Airlines. This turned into an ongoing saga that led to news articles and even TV show offers for Smith to talk about his negative experience. And all of this started because Kevin Smith sent out a barrage of negative Tweets about Southwest Airlines when he was in the middle of having a negative experience with them.

Twitter is a Powerful, Free Social Networking Tool

Bottom line: Twitter is a powerful social networking tool that you can use to generate traffic, build followers and manage perceptions of your company. And Twitter is a free tool. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a television ad, or even hundreds of dollars for a print media campaign; all you need is a few minutes each day to create and maintain a company presence on Twitter. Take advantage of this powerful, free social networking tool to market to today’s Twitter audience of roughly 28 million people.

Even the most well-designed website is useless if nobody sees it. To address this issue, a major focus of Web marketing is to bring people to your site. A reader asked me last week for tips on building followers for websites, so I thought I’d post here about some of the most common methods I use to drive traffic for myself and my clients. With the right strategies, you can use these techniques to grow your followers exponentially.

Add Dynamic Content Frequently

People have no reason to return to your website if you don’t add content periodically. Static websites provide information, but they don’t give a reader a reason to keep returning. Therefore, you might lose out on potential clients when readers have forgotten about your website weeks or months after viewing it. By adding dynamic content to your website frequently, you give readers a reason to come back. If readers come back, they’re more likely to think of your website, and utilize your product or services when they need it. Adding dynamic content regularly also enables you to broaden the keyword search terms by which people find your website, thereby expanding your potential audience.

Utilize Social Network Marketing

Social networking is the new buzzword, and it’s here to stay. Savvy companies are beginning to realize that they can leverage social media to spread word about their services or products, and to elicit responses and discussion from customers. This provides companies with an opportunity to reach consumers directly, and to respond to feedback, positive comments and negative criticism. Utilizing social networking enables you to grow your customer base organically through word of mouth and viral marketing with a minimum of effort, and simultaneously gives you an opportunity to influence how clients perceive your company.

Create Guest Blogging Opportunities

One valuable tool that can help you build followers for your website is guest blogging. Guest blogging has a few variations, but the most common technique for guest blogging is to invite someone to write an entry on your blog, and/or offer to write an entry for their blog. In this way, you reach out to the other blogger’s audience by showing them your content and a link to your website, and vice versa. If you trade guest blogging opportunities with a popular blogger, you can grow your audience by hundreds or thousands of people with one well-written post.

Exchange Links with Related Blogs

You can practice a similar strategy to grow your readership in conjunction with guest blogging, or independently: initiate a link exchange with related blogs. This is important: look for related blogs to trade links. By exchanging links with related blogs, you ensure that you have something to offer readers, and you gain a qualified audience that is interested in what you have to say. If you trade links with unrelated blogs, you won’t necessarily have anything to offer readers and your chances to increase conversion are low.

When it comes to establishing related blogs, look for blogs whose readers might be interested in your product or services, but aren’t directly competing. For example, if you have a personal injury law firm, you might want to exchange links with a motorcycle website. Motorcyclists might need your services, and you can provide them with important information about motorcycle injury statistics and how to deal with a motorcycle injury case. You wouldn’t want to exchange links with another personal injury attorney, because there is little value in reaching out to your competitor’s audience via your competitor’s page. (It’s much more useful to reach out to your competitor’s audience in other ways, where you can subtly establish why readers should choose you over competitors.)

Post to Article Directories

Finally, if you want to reach out to a wider audience and build followers for your website, consider reaching out to an audience via a large, well-established website. Article directories are a great way to reach potential clients who wouldn’t find you otherwise. When you post to an article directory, you gain the additional leverage of their weighty SEO. You can then post a resource box with a link back to your website, which is especially effective if you create a call to action in your article.

At the very least, posting to article directories gives you a chance to establish your expertise. At best, someone who is interested in your products or services can learn about what you have to offer and reach out to you directly through your website.

The Web is the marketing space of today. TV ads are becoming a thing of the past. Print media is even more outdated, as sad as it is to see print go away. The Web is where you need to focus your marketing efforts, and one very simple thing you can do is to manage your online presence to boost your public image.

What is an Online Presence?

Your online presence is basically a term that refers to everything on the Web related to your business. Your online presence does include your business website, but it also covers customer reviews, your presence on popular social media sites and anything else you can use to interact with your customers. The Web is an invaluable tool because it lets you actually see the things your customers are saying about your business. You don’t have to guess at what they think – if they love you – or hate you – you can find out on the Web. If you proactively manage your online presence, you can influence customer perception of your company by:

1. Responding proactively to customer concerns;
2. Conveying important information to your customers via the Web;
3. Finding out what your customers have to say about you;
4. Ensuring that information about your business is relevant and up-to-date;
5. Correcting misconceptions about your company or business.

How to Effectively Manage Your Online Presence

You can manage your online presence in a number of ways. One useful aspect of managing your online presence is to present a consistent, branded image. However, potentially more important is your ability to monitor and respond to what customers have to say about your business.

Managing Your Online Image

First and foremost, decide what image you want to present your customers and manage that image. Make sure your branding is consistent throughout your website, and anyplace else your business is represented on the Web. You may want to consider joining popular social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn and anything else that’s relevant to your business. Joining these websites gives you a face, and gives you the ability to more proactively manage your online image.

Responding to Customer Feedback

One of the most useful features of managing your online presence is the ability to track and respond to customer feedback. Set up a free Google Alert or other keyword tracking tool to find out when your customers refer to your business on the Web. Track what your customers have to say, and reach out to customers who have had a negative experience. You may be able to change their opinions in the way you handle their feedback, or you may at least provide a positive presence to onlookers who see that you’re attempting to address negative feedback.

You can also set up a service that tracks inbound linking. In this way, you can see when people create inbound links to your business, and check out the context of those links. If people are linking to your business and saying “Don’t work with these guys,” you might want to reach out to those people to try to resolve the issues. On the other hand, if people are linking to your website saying “These guys are great!” – you know you’re doing something right, and you can turn that into more customers and a higher conversion rate.

Conversely, you can reach out to other people who have negative feedback about your competitors. If you set up Alerts to track when your competitor’s names are mentioned, you can reach out to people who have left negative comments about your competitors and invite them to try your services or products, instead. Don’t drag your competitors through the mud – simply offer an invitation to see what you have to offer, and consider adding how it addresses their specific needs.

Avoid Mudslinging Online

One unsavory aspect of the Web is how easy it is to get into mudslinging contests. If a competitor is leaving negative comments about you somewhere, resist the temptation to drag your competitor through the mud, too. Simply inform your customers that a competitor has left those comments. Alternately, don’t drag your competitors through the mud, either.

Professional battles should stay behind the scenes, unless competitors are intentionally damaging your reputation, so keep your beef with your competitors out of the spotlight unless you’re directly responding to customer concerns. Think about how you feel when politicians engage in mudslinging tactics. It’s never popular, and it can result in losing a vote – so don’t do that to your business.

Case Studies: Successfully Managing Your Online Presence

I recently placed an order online for a hard-to-find product. I found a really good deal at a specific business, so I placed the order with that business, thinking I’d save money. I received an order confirmation, but days went by without receiving a shipment confirmation. I looked at the business policies listed on the website and saw that I should have gotten a shipment confirmation, and then gave the business an extra day or two after that just to be nice. Eventually, I called the business to ask about the status of my order.

When I spoke with someone at the business, he put me on hold while he checked my order. He came back a few minutes later saying he was having computer problems, and that he would have to call me back in 10 or 15 minutes. He never called me back. Instead, I got a call the next day from a completely different individual, who left me a message saying that my item was out of stock and that they had canceled my order. This person said that he had sent me an email confirmation stating that my order was canceled, but I never got one.

I did some research on the Web, and found many other people complaining of poor shipping practices, erroneous billing and other shopping-related problems with this company. I considered myself lucky that they hadn’t billed me, and moved on to order a similar item somewhere else.

The replacement item that I ordered from a different company yielded a completely different experience. I got four emails that afternoon – an email confirming my order had been placed, an email confirming that my order was being processed, an email with a copy of my invoice, and an email with shipment information. In addition, a representative of that company found a blog post I had written about the experience, and even left me a comment on my blog informing me that the product was in stock, and thanking me for the order.

I received the order quickly, and was thrilled by the customer service experience I got with the second company. I wrote another blog, adding my voice to the many other happy customers.

Now, when people go searching for those companies on the Web, they’ll see all of the customer comments. The first company has a slew of customer comments about poor shipping and billing practices, and frequent out-of-stock items. The second company has a host of positive comments about the order process and customer service.

If you were a customer, which company would you rather patronize?

In light of my articles on Why You Need SEO and Beware of Seo Firms last month, I thought I’d post some do-it-yourself SEO tips and tricks for small businesses or individuals who want to improve their search engine results without hiring a large firm. You can do a lot to improve your SEO on your own. If you don’t have the time, or don’t want to mess with the more technical aspects of do-it-yourself SEO, you can always outsource these functions – but know what they entail so you can decide if you’re getting what you pay for.

Content Optimization.

Content optimization is one of the keys of overall SEO, and it’s a service that I regularly provide for my clients. To optimize your content, you should break your content down into digestible chunks that pertain to a specific topic. Make sure the content relates to the title. If you’re not sure what to write about, or what title to use, try a free keyword search tool, such as Google’s Ad Words Keyword Tool, Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool, or other keyword search tools. These tools can give you an idea of what people are searching for so you can optimize your content for popular keywords in your field.

Use headers in your formatting to improve SEO.

One of the most important things you can do to improve your SEO yourself is to use headers in your Web page formatting. Many people simply use a “<strong>” tag to bold important subheadings in Web page designs. This totally misses out on the optimization available by using targeted headings. If you use a “<h1>”, “<h2>”, or “<h3>” tag for your headings, search engines place more weight on those headings, and give you a higher page rank if your headings relate to your title and your Web page content. By using the <strong> tool instead, search engines read your webpage as having no subheadings at all, and you’ll miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of those headings to boost your SEO and page rank.

Pay close attention to Title tags in DIY SEO applications.

Title tags are perhaps the single most important part of providing good SEO for your Web pages. Search engines look at title tags for keywords, and compare the title tags to your page to see if the content supports the title. If you don’t get your keywords in the title tag, you might not get ranked at all for that content – in spite of optimizing your content. The closer the keyword to the front of the title tag, the more it can influence your page rank. You should also make sure that the important title keywords appear at least once in your copy – bonus if you can work it into your subheadings and use the appropriate heading tags.

Leave the styling for CSS.

We’ve already looked at what opportunities you miss when you bold your headers instead of using header tags. Similarly, you should try to forgo styling in HTML as much as possible and leave the styling to the CSS. When you use CSS to style your page, you can specify how headings should look, how links should look and what visual styles you want to apply to your website. That means less code in your Web pages themselves, since the code is in the style sheet – and a better code-to-content ratio, which improves SEO.

Additionally, by keeping your styling in the CSS style sheets, you can implement standard HTML tags and code and capitalize on SEO functionality. You can also easily change styles via CSS to alter colors and other display properties, and test how these font and style changes affect conversion. This gives you an easy way to improve your conversion rates without having to spend hours changing every page’s HTML.

Deciding when to outsource SEO.

SEO isn’t something that everyone wants to do. Even though much of SEO is simple enough for anyone to implement themselves, it does still take time and requires you to tinker with the website. If you simply don’t want to deal with managing your website, or making the little tweaks that improve your SEO, it might be worthwhile to outsource your SEO.

Beware of expensive firms that charge you thousands of dollars for relatively minor SEO tweaks. Find out exactly what a firm’s SEO services entail, and decide whether it’s worth the cost for you. Much of what SEO companies do breaks down into these SEO categories: optimizing content, optimizing title tags and adjusting formatting. The technical aspects, such as title tags and formatting, are relatively easy tweaks and shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg.

For more info on things to look out for when you’re outsourcing your SEO, check out my article “Beware of SEO Firms.”