Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Strategies

A website rich with unique content will perform better with Google and other search engine sites. The addition of carefully placed keywords will help improve your search engine exposure and relevancy of the content itself. In addition, using a content marketing strategy has become an extremely important piece to the search engine optimization puzzle.

When doing your keyword research take into consideration your product, service and location. What are the top words that identify with those 3 key areas. Put yourself into the shoes of your target audience. What would they search for if they were looking for the service, product or information that you have to offer? Create your list by brainstorming on paper or in Notepad. Create several categories and geo-modify those keywords if you are trying to attract local business. Take those keywords and put them in a keyword research and find some keywords that have search volume and acceptable levels of competition.

Ideally you want to start with 3-5 core keywords that you use consistently within all of your marketing efforts. This holds especially true if you are just getting started with a new site. Don’t try to target too many keywords to start unless you have the time and resources to go after more. You want to focus on these words for an extended period of time, typically 3-6 months to start depending on the competition level (some clients we are able to achieve #1 rankings for in 2 weeks, others take 12 months – it will all depend on competition levels for that keyword). Long term focus will help build keyword impact in the search engines. Each article should put the main focus on one keyword while implementing the others where appropriate.

Your keywords should be carefully placed within your title and throughout your document without being overused. Place them 2 or even 3 times within the first paragraph. After that once in each paragraph is adequate. Remember, you are writing for a human reader, not the search engines, this is an extremely delicate balance to strike and takes some skill to achieve.

Another way to embed them within your content is to tag (Alt Text) a photo used within your copy with your keywords. Use them with your social media posts and when sharing the related content.
One common mistake is to fill a paragraph with all of your keywords and then hyperlink them all to the same page within your site. This appears "spammy" and will not be looked at favorably by search engines. A general rule of thumb to utilize hyperlinks would be to use only one for every 120 words of content and evenly space them down the page.

Improving your keyword usage in your content marketing will benefit the way you are viewed by search engines such as Google and bring more traffic and viable customers to your website. To successfully implement a content marketing strategy all begins at the research phase. Make sure you take some time to do proper keyword research and are targeting keywords that have a reasonable amount of competition (no competition isn’t always a good thing). Your end goal is to have a “resource” site, with 100+ pages of content with keywords containing lots of great information for your readers in video, audio, pdf and the good old written word.

One of the best things you can do to increase your leads and sales with online marketing is to focus on traffic conversion. If your site is really good at converting traffic (email opt-ins, e-commerce sales, lead forms, etc), you won’t need as much traffic. Too many business owners and marketing professionals focus on traffic and very little time is spent on traffic conversion strategies. Often times you need a lot less traffic then you think to make a lot of money using online marketing.

Here are 4 Traffic Conversion Strategies you can implement to increase conversion.

1) Soft Conversion – I call this traffic conversion strategy the "soft conversion". I call it a soft conversion, because it's a soft introduction to your company. You aren' trying to sell anything at this point, you are using the "give to get" strategy to establish this introduction. This is a must have for every business, I don’t care what industry you are in, you need to build your email mailing list. Using a soft conversion strategy, which is essentially opting into your email mailing list somehow, you are building one of your most important assets in your business – your mailing list.

There are businesses that earn on average about $1 per person on their list every time they mail to them. I know of companies that have over 100,000 people in their lists and each time they send out a high quality email, earn a 6 figure income per mailing. This is not the norm, but even for the small local business owner, having a list of 500-1,000 people to mail to each month keeps you relevant and in front of your target audience. Make sure that your soft conversion opt-ins are tied to your email marketing software and build your list automatically.

Some Ideas for a "Soft Conversion"
• Whitepaper Download
• Sign Up for our Newsletter (come up with a good offer to get people to sign up, give something away, discounts, monthly giveaways, etc).
• Free Information Kit
• Video Access (have a great informational video to share, have people opt in to view it)
• Webinars
• Brochure download

Soft conversion strategies require follow up of some kind. Consider setting up some autoresponders to engage these leads over the next 2,4,10, 30 days to pull them back to your site for main conversion. Your main conversion would most likely be your full lead page offer or product sales page.

2) Landing Pages – Improving the pages that have your offers on them can increase traffic conversion considerably. Split test some different landing page designs and layouts, offers and call to actions. Give the page some time to determine if it’s working or not. Often times people get impatient and change their landing pages too quickly without getting enough data to determine if a change is necessary or not.

If you are a local business trying to drive new leads, don’t overdo it! The simpler, the better in most cases. Make sure you have 1 phone number on the page that is highly visible. Often times, using a local number for a local online campaign (SEO, PPC, Email) is better vs using an 800#. You can also display a lead capture form on the page as well. With the lead capture form, asking for less information at this point will improve traffic conversion, so make sure you are not asking for too much from the prospect at this point or you might just drive them away. Get their Name, Email and Phone number. You may even have to leave the Phone number as “optional” at this stage in the lead generation process. A lot of people do not want to be contacted by phone or do not want to give out their phone number

3) Sell Benefits & Optimize Your Content – Stop trying to sell yourself or your company and simply sell the benefits of what you are offering. Using bulleted lists outlining the benefits of your products and services helps your traffic quickly scan your content and find the solution to their problem. Solve problems with your benefits list vs talking about what your company does. Monitor your conversion rates and if they are not where you would like them to be, start split testing pages or make 1 or 2 changes at a time to measure the impact. Going back through your site and re-focusing your content to sell benefits will improve conversion rates along with modifying your content to be easier to scan for online readers (shorter paragraphs, bulleted lists, use headings).

4) Use Video – video can play a vital role in traffic conversion. Using a video on your landing page, home page or elsewhere will provide a much higher level of engagement with your traffic then text will. This is also a huge differentiator as most businesses do not take the time to produce a video. You probably don’t even need to go and spend much money to create a video, use a Flip Camera and shoot it yourself. Video can provide a much higher level of personal touch with your prospects then your typical web page content. There are all kinds of data online as to the conversion rates of pages with video, do your own research and I think you will find that not using video is a big mistake.

Judging by most of the traffic conversion strategies that we see sites using online, especially for small to medium sized businesses, most companies could double or even triple their conversions in a short period of time simply focusing on these 3 key areas outlined above. What would 2x-3x’s the amount of leads from the same amount of traffic do for your business?

Blogging really is a form of social media. Some social media sites are hard to measure the success of and blogging can be included in this.
 
The key to keeping a successful blog is to decide what you're going to write about and why. Your posts should speak to a specific audience and share information that this audience will find both unique and interesting. You then want to stay focused on this topic. If you start your blog about car repair you should not write a post about fixing your roof.

Once you have outlined your blog topic, do some keyword research. Use the free Google Keyword tool and type in some keywords related to your blog topic. It helps if you get into the mind of your target prospect and ask yourself – Who am I trying to reach? What am I trying to accomplish? What would they search for in relation to this blog post?

Don’t wait to start tracking the traffic to your blog posts. Get Google Analytics or another analytics software installed into your blog right away. eFusion blogs come with analytics built in and Word Press blogs, you can easily add the Google Analytics tracking script. Tracking the analytics of your blog posts will tell you how many people are visiting your blog, what keywords they used, what blog post they landed on, as well as how long they stay and what they do from there.

Follow these steps to help you measure the success of your blog:
 
1. Track Visitation - How many people are visiting your blog?

2. Are You Sparking Conversation? - Do readers comment on what you have to say? Do they discuss it?

3. Duration of Visit - Use your analytics to find out how long people are staying on your site. Did they land on your blog by accident and leave right away or did they start with one blog post and spend time jumping around and reading more? This will help you determine if you blog as a whole is interesting to readers.

4. Page Visits - Analytics will let you see what pages people are visiting and what page they enter into your site through and what page they leave from. This can help you see what posts are grabbing traffic so you know what to keep writing about.

5. Physical Location - Analytics can get as detailed as telling you where your readership is coming from. If a high percentage of your readers come from California it might not make sense to blog about a recent snow storm.

6. Keywords – Find out what keywords people are using to reach your blog. You might find some great keywords that you could use to expand on throughout your existing site or even write more blog posts around.

Ultimately measuring blog success takes time. Measuring the ROI of a blog comes from readership and followers. A good web analytics program will help you better understand your readers and their viewing habits. The more you blog, the more traffic you will get which will ultimately lead to more business for you.

Website content that utilizes your keywords and provides valuable information that your consumers are looking for is a valuable addition to your website.

Keyword rich content can improve your SEO but it can work even more successfully when paired with social media marketing.

Building strong social media profiles allows you to nurture relationships with your target audience. They can follow you and engage in conversation about your company or product.

When you write new content for your website you can share it with your followers through your social media profiles. This extends the reach of your content while also improving your social media marketing.

The more internet marketing tactics you utilize the more they overlap. Taking the time to link all of your marketing campaigns together will make them all work harder and be more successful for your business.

Recently, I was introduced to the power of Google Voice and decided to sign up and give it a try. I heard about the launch of this new service by Google awhile ago, but really haven't had the time to check it out to determine what exactly it was and how I could use it in our business and how people could use it with their internet marketing strategies.

At this time its a 100% FREE service provided by Google. I can see where they might charge for this down the road, but right now their is no charge to use the service. My only concern with the free service is privacy issues, but I haven't heard any complaints yet. So the question becomes, how do you use Google Voice and how you can incorporate this into your online & offline marketing strategies?

Google Voice essentially gives you a free local phone number in all states in the US. You can use this number and Google Voice account as your primary number on your web site or landing pages for call tracking purposes. Have an office in Maine but located in California? No problem, setup a Google Voice number to target any state you do business in.

Using a specific Google Voice phone number, you can find out how many leads are being generated from your web sites by using that phone number only on your web site. Any call that is generated using this unique number will be stored and tracked in your Google Voice account. If you are a small business and out of the office on a regular basis, this would help improve your lead response time as well (set it up so that calls placed on your site are automatically forwarded to all your phones).

Not only can you use it for call tracking and lead measurement but you can also use it to do the following:

- Setup call forwarding or "Find Me" for all your phones (cell phone, office phone, home phone, etc). When someone calls your Google Voice phone number, you can set it up so that it simultaneously calls all of your numbers. Never miss an important call again. Google Voice can become your virtual receptionist if setup correctly.

- Voicemail Simplification - all voicemails from my Google Voice account are stored online, transcribed, and sent to either my Iphone as a Text or email. You can set it up either way. I prefer to have it transcribe the message and send me a text. That way I get the voicemail in real time and don't have to spend time opening my email and playing the message or logging into a voicemail account.

- Replace your office phone - we are now using Skype VOIP to make outbound calls. We tested a few VOIP services and found that Skype works just as well as any and much more flexible as far as using it wherever we go (coffee shops, moving between multiple offices, travel, etc). We setup our Skype account to use our new Google Voice number as the caller ID. You can also get a Skype phone number as well, but I recommend setting up the caller ID settings to show your Google Voice number to make things more simple. This is a great setup for a small 1 or 2 person office. If you have multiple extensions there are solutions through Skype for this, but I am not going to get into that in this post.

- Make calls online - Google Voice also allows you to send calls online, but in my opinion, Skype is a better solution for this for $30/year.

Google Voice also allows you to personalize voicemail messages for certain people, block callers, call screening, easily share voicemails via email or text, place international calls, send out free texts (SMS to Email feature is really neat), and make conference calls.

The key here is to use technology to help reduce costs, improve communication, and expand your online marketing tracking abilities. I suppose you could even use Google Voice as a tracking number in your offline marketing campaigns as well, but I am not sure that its really intended for that use. Make sure to read Google's Terms and Services before using it if you are not sure about your intended use.

Learn more about Google Voice: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html 

It has been said repeatedly that content on your website is the best way to improve your Google rank.

This is still very true but there are a few things you need to do to your copy in order to make it work for you once it is on your website.

1. Review your content and incorporate keywords

Before writing and posting your copy you should have done significant keyword research. Once you have these keywords you need to make sure they are being used correctly. You should be highlighting key words in your title, subtitles, link copy, URL and tags.

You also want to make sure keywords are being used correctly with attention to grammar and spelling. This attention to keyword detail will benefit your search engine optimization efforts. It will improve Google's rank of your website for those keyword search results.

2. Improve the quality of your external links

The second major factor in the way that Google evaluates your search engine optimization is dependent on your external links. By definition these are links to your website from outside sources. Examples of this may be another blog linking to a post of yours or a media outlet who wrote an article about you linking back to your site. Due to the integrity of these links it is not as easy to control as keyword usage within your copy.

The goal of these links should be utilizing your keywords in the links from other people's sites. The quality of the site that is recommending you will also improve the value of that link. A form of links called "deep linking" happens when a number of their website pages link to several of yours is also beneficial. Even links to your site from others social media pages will improve your Google rank.

The best way to monitor the links to your site is to make yourself aware of your referring sites and market yourself in a way that entices bloggers and webpage owners to send their visitors to your site.