Posted by Brett Nordin on January 28, 2010 under Making Sense of Social Media | 
Making Sense of Social Media
Social Media
Social networking sites have made getting your message out to like-minded people faster and cheaper than ever before. They provide free marketing by leveraging the power of groups and friends. You can use site-builders to add video, pictures, text, links and hosting is free. These sites can be set-up as communication and traffic funnels to your primary business website and are also a component of effective search engine optimization.
Here is a list of social networking sites that your company should be visible on:
My Space
Most famous in the U.S. but not heavily adopted internationally, it is dominated by Generation-Y users and began with an emphasis on music. The site allows you to create your own website, blog, post bulletins and send messages to “friends” that you collect in your network.
Twitter
Known as today’s water cooler, Twitter works like a group chat to share “what you are doing” with connected friends and family. With diligence, you can create a following of people who are interested in what you are working on.
Facebook
More complex than Twitter and a more mature audience than MySpace, Facebook allows you to create a personal website, share and connect with like-minded people.
Digg
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. The shared content turns into a conversation and allows people to vote on an idea or comment you post.
Squidoo
Squidoo allows you to make and share “lenses” which are web pages anyone can create on topics they care about. You can earn income by creating links to ecommerce sites such as Ebay and Amazon. A lens gets shared between groups and you can promote your site to other Squidoo users. Squidoo sites are also considered “authority” sites by the major search engines so it’s possible to reach high search rankings (first page of Google) if you use the right keywords in the title and lens description.
Here are some valuable tips for making Social Networking Sites effective response sites:
- Don’t overcrowd the site or use fancy graphics. Less is more. This is the biggest mistake I see online marketers make on these sites…too many videos, too many pictures and too many graphics.
- Make the focal point of your site a single video or text offer that directs a visitor to an opt-in site for an ethical bribe.
- Allow people to look at 1 thing, not 50. If they have more than one choice, they won’t make any.
- Make it a business site, not a personal site that has a bunch of your friends making inappropriate comments. Don’t directly sell your business but rather tell your story.
- Only invite others from your target market to become your ‘friends’. It’s best to invite people who have similar interests or background because they will be most likely to connect with you.
- Let people get to know you. People don’t want to be sold something outright, build relationships first and then offer an ethical bribe to bring a prospect closer to what you are selling.
To learn how social media can become part of an effective online marketing campaign, contact Halo Effect, an Arizona internet marketing firm for a free assessment of your business website.
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Posted by Brett Nordin on January 23, 2010 under Profiting From Paid Search |
Google Paid Search Advertising
Online Lead System
An online lead system can be developed so small and medium sized companies can use the internet to automate their prospecting and conversion process.
Companies grow by increasing the number of potential customers, retaining customers and getting referrals. In this article, we are going to focus on getting a lead or prospect to contact your business.
Every business would like to generate leads that consist of people who have a high propensity to buy your product or service. With print ads it is sometimes difficult to target an audience. Online, targeting can be accomplished by geography, behavior and demographics by using search engine marketing.
Millions of people are searching the internet everyday and it’s possible that thousands are looking for information on your product and services. The most typical way consumers look for things is by using a search engine like Google or Yahoo. When someone types in a search query, the search engine returns the most relevant information available on the internet. The search engine companies gives businesses the chance to advertise in areas surrounding the natural search results. The paid advertisements or listings can drive a prospect to your website when they click on your ad.
PPC or pay per click advertising is one of the advertising tools that allows a business owner to pay only when a prospect likes your ad enough to click on it an get the information your are promoting. PPC ads can be placed on both the search results pages and also on targeted websites that are related to your product or service. The campaign can be managed effectively by split testing ads, website pages the prospects visit and where they appear in ad listings. Budgets can also be controlled by placing spending limits per click and per day.
Google Local Listing Advertisement
Local search listings are available for brick and mortar businesses to advertise in their local community. Both Google and Yahoo allow businesses to list their business for free in a directory based on the location and category of business. Google gives up the top of the natural search results to the local listing service, making it very attractive real estate.
When setting up your advertising campaign, it is imperative to consider what a prospect may type into the search engine if they were looking for your product or service. If your advertisement or search phrases are too broad, the ad will be ineffective and the search engine will increase the price of your advertisement. Google, the most used search engine on the planet, rates the click through rate of your ad, the quality of your website as it relates to the search term and the conversion rate on your website. If the scores remain high, Google will continue to show your ad at a lower cost.
To generate a lead, a business can provide several different methods of contact on their website. This can be accomplished by telephone, live chat, email or by having the prospect fill out a contact form. The trick to cost effective advertising is to decrease the cost of generating a lead. When a prospect clicks on your ad, the page they land on, also known as a landing page, should provide the information promised in the ad and then persuade them enough to contact your company or complete a sale. The landing page should be optimized for the target audience and feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. The goal of the page is to motivate the prospect to take another step – fill out a contact form, call a telephone number or make a purchase.
Turning a new lead into a sale is part of a conversion process that should be mapped out, tested and refined as part of the overall campaign. To learn more about search engine marketing and how your company can set up it’s own online lead system, contact Halo Effects, an Arizona internet marketing company.
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Posted by Brett Nordin on January 15, 2010 under Understanding Search Engines |
Search Engine Optimization – SEO
Understanding Search Engines
You may have heard the term “SEO” which is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. By ‘optimizing’ your social media sites, Social Networking sites, blog posts, videos and articles you have a chance of ranking higher (first pages) on search engines like Yahoo and Google.
In 2007, Google accounted for 70% of all search traffic in the United States.
Search Engine Optimization is a science in itself and is a constant battle to maintain a high ranking and drive free traffic to your website. A sneaky way of avoiding the competition is to build a strategy for stealing all of the traffic that no one is paying attention to. That is how the little fish competes with the big fish.
The most popular search terms are very competitive and it’s very difficult to achieve high rankings if you use them in the titles and bodies of your website content.
Living in the Long Tail
To put this into perspective, let’s use a real world example. Let’s imagine you want to search for the term “Carpet Cleaning” in Google.
Example Search Term: “Carpet Cleaning”
The term “Carpet Cleaning” has been searched for 1,500,000 times in the past 30 days…on Google alone. Yahoo search volume is typically less than half that of Google.
There are over 5,000,000 websites that contain the exact phrase ”Carpet Cleaning”. Trying to compete on the search engines with a new website would be futile – there are too many strong competitors! Our approach is going to fly under the radar. We do this by looking at keywords phrases called “Long Tail Keywords” that include the word “Carpet Cleaning”.
Example Long Tail Keyword: “Phoenix Carpet Cleaning”
This keyword phrase was only searched for 2,900 times in the past 30 days, however, it only appears on 8000 websites. With those statistics we have a much better shot at getting our web content on the first page of the search engines.
In order to drive serious traffic using these little known Long Tail Keywords, we must collect 15-20 and integrate them into our web content. This means using them in our blogs, articles and videos.
Best practice teaches to use the exact Long Tail Keyword phrase in the title of the blog, article or video and then use it 3 times in the body.
The other half of the traffic equation is how many other websites view your site as having relevant information. The search engines believe a website is more “relevant” when other sites add your link to their site.
More links = Higher Search Ranking
Having more links will not only yield more traffic to your website but will also push your website higher on the search engine ranking page.
There are several strategies for doing this. You can ask other website owners to cross link, you put their link on your site and vice versa. Or, you can use the other free websites described in this chapter to point back to a central website.
I recommend the central website be a blog because it is the most familiar way to start a community/relationship site.
To learn more about search engine optimization and how your business can benefit, contact Halo Effects, an Arizona internet marketing firm for a free assessment of your website.
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