Online Marketing » I write what you meant to say

Use the Right Tools for the Job

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.

How to Build Followers for Your Website

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.

Manage Your Online Presence to Boost Your Image

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:

Responding proactively to customer concerns;
Conveying important information to your customers via the Web;
Finding out what your customers have to say about you;
Ensuring that information about your business is relevant and up-to-date;
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?

Using Email Newsletters to Reach Your Clients

Using email newsletters to reach your clients is a valuable tool. Whether you’re communicating to internal clients or external clients, newsletters give you an opportunity to explore new initiatives, discuss important issues or reach out and engage your audience. I write newsletters for both corporate and consumer-driven clients, and today I’m going to tell you about why and how newsletters can be an important tool in your online marketing repertoire.

Using Newsletters to Communicate with Internal Customers

Six Sigma, one of the most successful business management programs out there and utilized by many Fortune 500 clients, talks about both internal and external customers. In order to run a successful business, you must evaluate the needs of all of your customers, and develop processes to manage both internal and external customers. One of the keys to successfully managing your internal customers is communication. This is where a newsletter can be vital for handling your relationships with internal customers.

Many companies utilize the corporate newsletter to communicate with employees, or between divisions. However, the news in a corporate newsletter is often out-of-date and interesting only to the people who are featured. Many corporations have a hard time connecting with employees on a one-on-one basis, and creating relevant content. This is where an experienced writer can come in and help. By creating engaging content, you can solicit reactions from employees and get feedback about new programs and initiatives. An experienced writer can also help you find the right way to present an idea to minimize fuss and maximize constructive conversation.

Using Newsletters to Communicate with External Customers

Finding new channels to reach your external customers is a major part of your marketing focus. Not only must you find exciting ways to tempt your clients, but you must also find ways to interact with them. Newsletters are one valuable feature you can use to communicate with your potential and existing clients.

The key to creating engaging, effective newspapers is to provide valuable content. Don’t just write a sales pitch to your clients. Outline a problem or challenge that your clients might face. Then, tell them how your product or service solves that problem. Alternately, you can simply provide valuable content to your clients that keeps you in the forefront of their minds and simultaneously establishes you as an expert in your field. That way, when your external client does need your product or services, you’ll be at the front of their minds.

The Effectiveness of Using Email Newsletters to Reach Your Clients

Three things make print newsletters an ineffective medium to reach your clients: it’s cost-prohibitive, it’s not timely, and people don’t read as much print media as they used to read. Email newsletters cut down on all of those factors, and make it easy for clients to browse your content.

The only cost you have with email newsletters is the time spent writing the newsletters (or the cost of hiring the writer) and a potential cost if you use a paid broadcast email tool. It drastically reduces the cost versus printing paper copies of a newsletter and the cost of postage to mail them – a cost savings which make email newsletters an even more attractive medium through which to reach your clients.

Using email newsletters to contact your clients also enables you to present more timely content. You can plan a newsletter for a specific holiday or time of year, or you can jot off a quick email newsletter if an important piece of news or industry development occurs. You won’t be sending out updates weeks or months after they happen, as is often the case with print newsletters.

Finally, sending out email newsletters makes it easier for customers to ‘get’ and review your content. Many people simply throw paper mail away these days if it’s not a bill, a check or a hand-written letter from a friend. Right off the bat, you miss out on your opportunity to reach those customers. Email, on the other hand, is something that most people check every day, and spend a few minutes reviewing every morning or evening. With an email newsletter, you’ve got a real chance of getting in front of your customers – if only for a few seconds – and that gives you an opportunity to capture their attention and convince them to read your newsletter.

Don’t let this valuable marketing tool slip through your fingers. It’s inexpensive, and highly effective – especially compared to paper media. Email newsletters give you an opportunity to stay in regular touch with your customers – both internal and external – and initiate valuable communications. This translates directly to improved relations and higher conversions, at a very affordable cost. Using email newsletters, you can effectively target your audience and deliver a high-quality message, and the affordable rate paired with the increased conversion ratio means that email newsletters provide an excellent Return on Investment, or ROI, for your marketing dollars.

Do-it-Yourself SEO Tips

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.”

Quality vs. Quantity in Online Marketing

The question of quality vs. quantity is a question you face in any marketing campaign. If you keep a blog, should you strive to post daily and occasionally let drivel slip through, or post once or twice a week but limit your posts to quality information? If you’re using articles to promote your services, should you contract for ten short articles just to get your name out there, or one quality article to increase conversion and convince people to use your services?

The argument for quantity.

The argument for quantity is obvious. The more opportunities that people have to see your name, the more likely you are to reach people who wouldn’t see you otherwise. I.e. if you have 10 articles posted on 10 different websites, you’ve got a much higher chance for readers to see your articles than if you have 1 article posted on 1 website.

This is a common mistake that many people make when they’re planning a new marketing campaign. Many people would look at a limited budget, and say “Ok, I can get 10 low-quality articles out of this budget if I hire a low cost provider.” The simple mathematical outcome would drive the decision to select a low-cost provider for the sake of getting a greater quantity. Unfortunately, that approach only examines one part of the picture.

The argument for quality.

The argument for quality has more subtle benefits. If you deliver quality content, you’ll give your readers valuable content – content that they’ll have a reason to stick around and read. When readers see low-quality content, they’re likely to click away again immediately in search of someone else who provides better content. In this respect, quantity gives you more opportunities to get in front of readers, but less of an opportunity to make an impact.

For offisite article marketing, a similar principal applies. If you’re posting content offsite to try to lure readers onto your website and into using your services, you’ll need to give them a compelling reason to click that link. When you post ten articles that are full of the same drivel you can find on any other website, readers have no reason to click through to find more information and no temptation to use your services. If you post only two or three articles that contain unique information and convince your readers that your services are valuable, you’ve given those readers an excuse to click through to your website.

Quality content is your key to conversion.

Quality content also serves a very valuable purpose: it establishes you as an expert. Provide readers with informative, unique information, and they’ll see that you know your field. If you speak only in generalities or fail to give readers something they can’t find on a hundred other websites, they have no reason to choose your services over any other provider. When you’re looking for conversion, quality counts.

Quality content drives page views organically.

The primary argument in favor of quantity versus quality is the argument that a higher quantity of content gets you visibility in more places. While this is technically true, it’s not the only way you can get visibility. If you provide quality content on a wide range of topics – especially if you provide content on an ongoing basis, like in blogging – you’re much more likely to capture readers organically through search engine results and word of mouth. SEO is skewed to provide greater preference to ‘quality’ content; not keyword-laden pieces that are designed to ‘trick’ search engines into providing a higher page rank; so you’re more likely to capture readers organically if you provide quality content. This gives you opportunities you wouldn’t have with poor-quality, high-quantity content.

Quality content is good for word-of-mouth.

Low-quality content may get you page views, but people won’t think of you twice and certainly won’t recommend you. High-quality content – content that provides valuable or difficult-to-find information – is content that people will remember, and recommend to friends and contacts. How do you think things grow virally? It isn’t because it’s forgettable content. The key to viral marketing is to provide memorable content that people want to share – not mediocre content that people just don’t care about.

Bottom line: ROI on quality content is better.

Bottom line: your return on investment for quality content is better than quantity. Sure, quantity can get you page views – but low-quality content won’t get you conversion. Since the key to any business website is conversion, quantity just doesn’t have the bang for the buck that quality content provides. Invest in quality content, and you’ll see a direct return on investment that correlates with the quality of your content.