Are you afraid of wasting money on Internet marketing/online advertising? The idea of paying per click for visitors who may not buy could be frightening to you. A lot of website owners believe that Internet marketing campaigns will bleed a lot of money before they become worthwhile. You don’t have to fail miserably to figure out how to succeed. You can learn from the experts who’ve made mistakes and developed winning formulas for internet marketing. Even if you’ve only got a small marketing budget, it could make a big difference. Here are some low cost / big impact tips from a business consultant who helps small to medium-sized UK businesses. Create and Optimize a Website Do you have a website? What is it currently doing for you? A website should be more than an online brochure. It should be a beacon that attracts traffic. But it shouldn’t end there. Once the traffic arrives on your website, you need to convert – Read the full article
Search engine optimization is considered both an art and a science. You can learn it and fine-tune your processes to allow for your own set of SEO best practices. But as a beginner in SEO, you should expect to make a lot of mistakes. But that’s okay: it’s a good way for you to learn. However, you could also learn from the mistakes of others. Here are the top five mistakes that most SEO beginners commit: 1. Not focusing on content. Most site owners and webmasters tend to rely on tricks and so-called SEO techniques to get a better ranking on search engines. Because of that, they neglect the content of the site. This is probably the biggest mistake that anybody doing SEO could commit. Over the years, webmasters have gained artificially high ranking from getting links from link farms, or getting reciprocal links, or spamming DMOZ. There were other black hat and grey hat techniques. But over time, these tactics were found out – Read the full article
It is your company’s obligation to be clear, upfront, and transparent about how you collect and store visitor information. Your website presents an opportunity to make money, but it also entails a certain level of responsibility on the part of your company to safeguard this valuable information. In today’s environment where people are more suspicious about online companies, being straightforward is in your best interest. One of the key aspects in running a website is developing a privacy policy. Writing a privacy policy is a simple step that goes a long way towards retaining visitor trust for the long term. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing a privacy policy: Do Not Copy a Privacy Policy Off Another Website It may be easy, but it is not the right thing to do. The privacy policy is a legal document; as such, it is important to know what you’re getting yourself into before publishing one. While a blog – Read the full article
A few days ago we talked about how important local search / SEO has become – and what you can do to enhance your local search performance and Internet marketing efforts. Well, as we conducted our research for that story, we stumbled upon a number of neat local search engine optimization tools. And, knowing how much readers love lists (our competitive intelligence tools post is one definitely worth checking out), we made another one – this time, to help you in your search for tools that are designed to give you an edge over local competitors. Enjoy! Local Search Toolkit This is one of our favorite local SEO tools right now. The invention of seOverflow’s Mike Belasco and Mary Bowling, the Local Search Toolkit features a Google Places Results Analyzer which generates competitive analysis and data from search results in Google Places. With the Local Search Toolkit, you can download, analyze, and review citation sources – and sort seamlessly through – Read the full article
It’s great to drive traffic – online and offline – from all corners of the world. But if you’re a smart marketer, you’ll realize you don’t have to be so international – at least not when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Thanks to local search, businesses don’t have to squander resources on attracting customers and visitors that are beyond their geographic reach anyway. One can instead focus on catering to the heart of the locals. Want to find out how? Here’s a list of 17 great local SEO and local search tips, tricks, and tools to help you get started. Claim. Claim your local listing on Google Places. While you’re at it, go to Bing Local and Yahoo Local and claim your listings there, too. Apply best practices. Read our guide on Google Places to put yourself closer to the center of the map. Submit your info to the online yellow pages. Sign up in online directories and – Read the full article
WordPress is arguably today’s most popular blogging platform – for reasons that the most brilliant Web programmers and developers or novice bloggers and startup business marketers can appreciate. Actually, WordPress is popular for reasons that even search engine giant Google can appreciate. Matt Cutts – the well-known SEO guru and Webmaster behind Google (which, by the way, has Blogger as its own blogging platform) – even went so far as to praise WordPress, saying that: “WordPress takes care of 80 to 90 percent of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – let’s go into more detail about SEO later. For now, let’s go through the list of highlights of WordPress as a blogging platform. Getting Started The process of signing up for WordPress is simple and easy enough. The most awesome part? It’s free. WordPress is open-source software, which means that you don’t have to pay any license fees to use the core – Read the full article
Paid search is a wonderful advertising platform because it gives you clear-cut analytics for ROI decisions. Twitter, on the other hand, is a wonderful advertising platform because it is still natural and fun. Both paid search and Twitter advertising differ in scope and functional use in the marketing mix; however, Twitter recently announced a tool called the “Follower Dashboard”, which, in conjunction with geo-targeted ads, makes Twitter a very attractive advertising medium. Twitter announced the ability for companies to pay for “Promoted Tweets” earlier in 2010, where Coca-Cola garnered 86 million impressions with a single promoted tweet. Holy! Okay, sure Coca-Cola probably paid out the “Wah-Zoo” for that tweet, but even if they paid half a million dollars (ex: cost-per-engagement, or CPE, at $.10 & $6.06 per 1,000 impressions) for that promoted tweet, it would still be competitive with a paid search of $10 CPA. Okay, Twitter is great, we know. But up until now it was only great for – Read the full article
Before Facebook, before Twitter, there was something called blogging. Remember that? Well, blogging hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion; only, this form of online content publishing has evolved since the time of LiveJournal and Open Diary. (That was so 1998!) And it’s certainly attracted the attention of more and more business owners who have recognized that the interactivity and SEO benefits of blogging go a long way in establishing – and enhancing – their visibility online. Now, any SEO expert will tell you that incoming links are a great way of boosting the popularity of your company or business blog – that they increase your PageRank (PR). But few ever counsel linking out to other sites or blogs, which should actually be just as integral a part of your linking strategy as generating incoming links. Why? Well, here are only some of the reasons: It’s good practice. Bloggers tend to get obsessed about getting as many incoming links as possible. – Read the full article
