Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Strategies

So, your company is already online and seeing some success – great! But, are you really doing everything you could to make your online marketing efforts a success? Here are a few things you might not yet being doing or forgot to do:

Make sure your content is able to be shared. Users who frequent your website, blog and social media networks will often want to re-share the content you are posting. Make sure they can not only do this, but that it is a quick and easy process for them. There are plenty of free widgets out there that are designed to help you do this successfully. Allowing users to share you content will make your online making efforts seen by a wider audience.

Create an email marketing strategy. Even if it is just a quarterly email newsletter or regularly scheduled follow-up blasts to current customers, keeping in contact will help them remember you are there. Build a strong email list and stay in touch with potential and current customers. Also, by including an email form of staying in touch to your marketing efforts you will have the added benefit of possible up-sales or referrals!

Don’t forget about customer reviews (& customer review sites). Not many people use the Yellowpages these days. A quick search online can not only make your company visible to a potential client, but it can also tell them experiences others have had with your product or services. Make sure you are not only on major review sites (Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.), but that you are actively encouraging clients to leave you reviews as part of your online marketing strategy.

Make sure your website is mobile friendly (or you have a mobile version of your site). With such a huge population of users accessing the web via mobile (and tablet) devices nowadays it is imperative that they can navigate your website easily. You want to be seen on mobile searches and have users be able to see your website properly on their mobile device. Also, it is good to note that mobile users are usually searching for specific information, so make sure this information is not only on your mobile site, but is easily found.

Adding these few to-do’s to your online marketing efforts can take you from seeing some online success, to being a major player on the Internet. Want to know if your current website is performing well for your current marketing strategy? Our Free Web Scan can tell you what you need to know.

During my Online Marketing Consultant career, I have often been asked what the key activities a company should be doing online to not only be visible, but also successful. Well, my first answer would be to hire an Online Marketing expert, but if your budget just doesn’t allow for it or you want to try a do-it-yourself approach there are five key areas a business should focus on when trying to have success online:

One, keywords. Any successful online business marketing strategy should begin here. You need to know what keywords are appropriate for your products or services, audience and industry. By doing your initial keyword research you will be able to –

• Write content focusing on these keywords, thus driving search traffic up.
• Understand your competition and what they are focusing on.
• Have a deeper understanding of what your customers are looking for online, and have the ability to tailor your services to them.

DO NOT skip or skimp out on your keyword research. This should be the foundation of everything else you do online.

Two, website development. You don’t have to go and spend thousands of dollars on a web design team to create your businesses website. The key to any successful website is to have:

• Clean look – no clutter!
• Simple to use navigation
• Valuable content (more on this later)
• Clear call-to-actions
• Strong branding

Three, quality content. Having quality and valuable content not only helps increase traffic to your site (Google gives big search bonuses to sites with quality content), but it also ensures users stay on your site and eventually convert into a lead. Your online business marketing strategy should contain creating keyword rich content that not only has value, but is also easily readable for users.

Also, you need to continue to create content (blog posts, news articles, etc.) as time goes on to keep your site fresh.

Four, target your local audience. Unless your business is a global online store, you should be focusing on your local city / county / state audience. This means letting the user know your products or services are for their specific location. Some simple ways of doing this are:

• Adding the areas you service at the top of your web pages – “Coffee Cabana services the Chicago, Illinois area”
• Creating listings for your company on location based websites and apps – Google Places, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook Check-in, etc.
• Use geographical targeted keywords when writing content
• Get listed in local search directories online and offline
• If you service a larger area (usually state-wide), you might want to create geo-targeted landing pages for each major location/city around you

Five, take advantage of social media networks. You might skeptical of their value, but social media networks can be a powerful tool for anyone’s online business marketing strategy. Actually not being visible on the popular social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) can almost send the message to users that you don’t exist. Not only do you want to be visible, but you want to also be sure you are engaging users and addressing any potential negative brand images you may have. Some companies even use social media networks as another form of customer service!

Anyone can find success online; the key is to have a strong online business marketing strategy that creates results! If you are thinking about developing your own online marketing strategy or you want to see if your current strategy is working, start by taking our Free Website Scan.

Recently my TV decided it didn’t want to work anymore and in an effort to save some money I decided I would try to fix it myself. A few frustrating hours later, with the back of my TV off with wires, cables, and a serious amount of dust everywhere, I was questioning why I didn’t call a TV repair expert? This got me thinking, in the land of Online Marketing, is it better to just call an Online Marketing Consultant or try to do-it-yourself?

Well, you need to ask yourself - what exactly do you get from working with an Online Marketing Consultant?

How about the obvious – they are online marketing experts. You are a business owner, and I think it is safe to assume, you know more about your products/services then you customers. The same can be said about an Online Marketing Consultants. They work with online marketing campaigns all the time and know what it takes to develop an online campaign that works.

Also, you need to think about time. Developing an online marketing strategy and executing that strategy can take a lot of working hours. Especially in competitive markets, it takes a small army to implement an effective online marketing campaign. Not to mention, once a campaign is launched the work is rarely over. Most online marketers continue to monitor results, test landing pages, and make tweaks for optimization after launch day.

The last thing you should consider when trying to make the decision between do-it-yourself marketing and working with a professional Online Marketing Consultant is the importance of your online presence. For most businesses being visible online is extremely important and not coming up on search engines can sometimes mean you are non-existent. Can you really say the cost of working with an Online Marketing Consultant outweighs having the online presence your company needs? I firmly believe that in the near future if a company doesn’t have a great online presence, they will NOT compete in their market (unless your brand is huge like Nike or Apple, but even they are a force online).

Now, you might think that being online isn’t as hard as fixing a TV, but I want to urge you to consider all the details of running an online campaign - keyword research, developing a successful website, working with Google (and other search engines), optimizing webpages, developing a social media strategy, backlink building, off-page marketing, on-page marketing, and much more…. Now those wires and cables aren’t as intimidating are they? Get started with a WebScan and initial consultation with WSI for free to see how your current strategy stacks up.

It is a common goal of anyone who conducts business through a website to want to appear at the top of the search results for their core keywords or phrases. With a solid search engine optimization strategy combined with a thoughtful pay-per-click campaign you can ensure your website will be among the top results for searches involving your keywords.

However once this goal is met where do you go? How can you build upon being the number one organic and paid search result for your keywords? Even if you are getting little traffic to your stand alone website, there are many more ways to drive quality traffic and brand awareness “off-site.”

The answer is to increase your web presence across many different online marketing channels. Being number one in organic search for some of your keywords is great, but it leaves room for your competition in the rest of the first page spots (2-10), and there is also more “space” on Page 1 in Google now with the integration of their Google Places listings. If your site appears first (or even 1-3) on the list of search results, it is very likely that the person searching will visit your site. Hopefully once they land on your site they'll find everything they need and not leave until they've made a purchase or taken action with your company. However it's more likely that they'll go back to the search results and check out a couple other websites or even mix up what they are searching for to get even more specific. This leaves room for the competition to swoop in and steal the business if you are not targeting more than one location in the search results.

Enhancing your web presence means creating a strategy to dominate organic search results using multiple websites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google Places, etc. There are so many sites, its impossible to list them all in this article. You need to register your business and website with local directories, review sites, setup a blog or 2 focusing on different keywords and services you offer, a micro site, social media, and article marketing sites.

When done correctly and optimized highlighting your keywords, location, business name…the goal is that your business could potentially take up the entire first page of the search results. Dominating the page and showing the person searching that you are #1-#10 in your market creates huge brand power. Even just getting 2 or 3 listings on page 1 for a keyword related to your services or products can drive quality traffic and separate you from the pack.

Increasing the number and quality of business listings for your website can guarantee that more people come accross your business. This will ultimately drive more traffic to your site and help show you and your site as a leader in your industry.

Magazines are now offering online subscriptions, consumers are catching up on television shows they missed online, and products are searched for and purchased on the web. Building an online presence is more important than ever.

Watch this video to learn more about the importance of digital marketing and look into WSI's new platform that will revolutionize online digital marketing, WSI ReachCast.