2005-09-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Google Alerts and Checking Back Links:
I might be slow to the punch, but I just signed up for Google Alerts in a way that will keep me informed of my major competitor's backlinks, and my backlinks. If you go to http://www.google.com/alerts/faq.html?hl=en Google Alerts, and you have a gmail account, you can ask for a daily, weekly, monthly email alert to be sent to you with all the new backlinks your competitors have requested. You just put the LINK: WWW.xyzcompany.com in the search terms, and you will see all the backlinks in an email posting. It seems kind of interesting, and may help with staying abreast of your competition. I'd be interested if anyone else has found this useful.

2005-09-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

Overview of Internet Marketing Strategy: I'm starting this blog as an example of an internet marketing strategy that can be used by all websites, and has the added advantage of being free. I've decided to do a series on internet marketing for several newsletters in the Philadelphia area, and this is the first piece in a four-part series.

Overview

This website promotion series suggests proven methods of achieving and sustaining high levels of qualified visitors to your website. It outlines how to promote a website, and also discusses how to convert these visitors to paying customers. Why should you read this series? If you have a website, and you're not taking advantage of these interenet marketing strategies, you are missing visitors and probably revenue.

Most commercial websites on the Internet get less than 10 unique visitors per day coming to their site. Now, of these 10 visitors, how many are buying? The average conversion rate for a commercial website is 2%. This means you need 100 unique visitors to your website to generate two orders. So lets say you have the average website, and you are getting 10 visitors a day, or about 300 visitors a month. You can expect about 6 orders a month. That’s not very impressive. How can you do better? Assuming you have a good product or service, priced competitively, and a well-designed, functional website, all you need is more qualified traffic. And that’s what we are going to discuss here: How to get more qualified traffic to your website.

The internet is a very competitive place. To succeed on the internet, your website needs many promotional strategies, not just high search engine rankings. Internet marketing is something that requires diligence, planning, and analysis, but this work is justified by the potential payback in business for your company. Another bonus to internet marketing is that virtually all of these promotional techniques are either free, or are very low cost in comparison to traditional marketing techniques.

Remember that bringing visitors to your website takes time, and is the result of a process. Most websites can easily generate thousands of unique visitors with the appropriate amount of promotion. If the website has good content, visitor traffic should continually increase from then on.

Obviously, the first thing you need to do is make sure your site is error free, working correctly, and optimized with page titles and keyword phrases. A free tool to check your web pages is Dr. HTML: http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/ Then you should check your position in the major search engines at least quarterly, and if you find your site has been dropped by one search engine, resubmit your site to that search engine. After you have ensured that your site is optimized, you should begin concentrating your marketing effort into other promotional avenues.

Natural Search Engine Optimization: Search engines index your website by sending a “spider” program to a page of your site, and this spider reads every word of text on the site, and follows every link. Search engine optimization includes writing page titles, descriptions and page text that are keyword rich, making sure to focus on the best keywords as indicated by what people are searching for. You can see what they are searching for by visiting the resource center at Yahoo and using the keyword selection tool: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/. Avoid tricks or gimmicks to try to cheat the search engines, because they will catch you and ban your URL. Optimize every single page of your website, and make sure you have a sitemap and a robots.txt file. You should submit to the major search engines yourself (manually), and then check back quarterly to make sure you are listed in each engine.

Register in Web Directories: Web Directories are hierarchical directories on the Internet that are maintained by real people. Some web directories are Yahoo, Looksmart, and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). You should manually submit your site to directories. Some of these directories charge an annual fee (Yahoo is about $300 per year for inclusion). One of the most important submissions you can make is to DMOZ, and it is free. It will take about 15 minutes of your time, and you will be successful if you don't use any .

Link Trading or Reciprocal Linking: Getting other sites to link to yours is the most important part of internet marketing. Search engines will raise your ranking if other important (have a Google Page Rank of 4 or more) websites link to yours as a source of information. Link trading also increases direct traffic to your site from other sites that may have complimentary products or services. Link trading is free, but it takes time and effort on your part.

Bid Ranked (Pay per click) Search Engines: This is perhaps the most cost effective method of interenet advertising. When you advertise in a bid ranked engine, you can precisely control what your visitors will see, and the position you will appear. There are more than 400 bid ranked engines on the Internet. The main two engines are Google Ad Words and Overture (which is part of Yahoo). With this type of engine, you pay exactly what you want to pay for qualified traffic, and if you have a shopping cart, you can put a piece of code on your website which will track your conversion rate. This way you can be absolutely sure what your return on investment for marketing is.

Write a BLOG (Web Log): The reason blogs have become such a marketing phenomenon is that people don't trust advertising, and they are desperately searching for real information. Since Blogs are written by people giving their honest opinions, they are a great information source. When bloggers write about their experience and their feelings, buyers tend to give that information more weight than an ad or even a testimonial. Your blog should be a public place where people can openly talk about your products. Let your employees write for your blog. The problem with corporate blogs is that they are too often managed and polished. If you have a good product, let people talk about it. Go to other people's blogs and write about products or issues like yours and ask for comments. Anyone who writes about you helps increase your visibility on the web.

Email Marketing: You should be using a database of email addresses collected from your website and other promotions to connect with customers via permission email marketing. Gather the email addresses of the visitors to your website (with their express permission), send them your periodic newsletter, product updates, and special offers, etc.

Participate in Online Auctions: Sometimes the easiest way to test a new product or service is to take out an ad on eBay and see what kind of response it gets. This is a very effective and inexpensive way of market testing. It also has immediate and sometimes very effective paybacks. Take advantage of auction sites like eBay, and Yahoo Auctions.

Join a Webring: Joining Webrings is a great way to tap into the community that is interested in your subject matter. Usually the only requirement is for you to paste a banner back to the webring from your site. To find an appropriate webring, search in your favorite browser for webring and your keyword phrase. Webrings are free and easy to join, and they may send qualified visitors.

Write about yourself in Message Boards: Message Boards (Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc.) can be a great source of free advertising as long as you obey their rules. Message boards allow write to your targeted visitors about issues of concern. Writing for message boards should be a permanent part of your internet marketing efforts. Again, this does not cost any money, just a little time and effort.

Free Classifieds: Free classifieds ads take only time and effort, but can generate a lot of traffic to your site. Search for them on your favorite browser. There are even affordable submission services which will automatically submit and resubmit your classified advertising, and a link to your website. Or, you can do this yourself, for free.

Newsletter Campaigns: There are literally thousands and thousands of permission based email newsletters on the Internet. Most of these sell commercial ad space. There are some unbelievable bargains to be had on these resources, and click-through rates are much higher than banners. They are great tools and should not be neglected.

Affiliate Programs: If you don’t have an affiliate program on your website, you are missing an effortless method of letting your website make money for you, and for other websites to become your marketing sales force on the web. Many of the most successful websites on the Internet get the majority of their traffic and sales from affiliate programs. In short, you can quickly and easily recruit hundreds or even thousands of websites that will promote your product or service, and link to you in return for a small percentage of every sale they send your way. You can and should be running an affiliate program on your sites.

Comparison Shopping Portals: There are hundred of comparision shopping portals. An example would be Froogle.com which is Google’s price-based shopping search engine. You pay only for the traffic you get, and the traffic from these portals usually generates a higher conversion rate than your other traffic.

Viral Marketing: Make sure you have a “refer a friend” link on your site. There are many other forms Viral Marketing can take. Essentially, one potential lead generates another, and another, and another, without additional effort.

Traditional Media: You should always remember to include your URL in all other advertising. Your business cards and brochures, your away message on your corporate phone, telephone book ads, direct mail, TV, radio, etc should direct visitors to your website.

Geo-Targeting or Local Advertising Strategies: There are over a dozen ways to promote a website locally or regionally.

Amazon zShops: If you are selling something, Amazon zShops can sell it for you. They get your products listed in searches inside Amazon.com. It can send you some great, qualified traffic.

RSS Feeds for Content: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) may not necessarily a great option for every website because it takes some effort, but it can have huge payback in visitors who want to stay abreast of fresh information. Basically, you create an information area of your website dedicated to top notch information about your subject matter. Optimize every page for relevancy search engines, and be sure to feature an offer on every page. Get news feeds from CNN or the calendars, or sports sites. Offer a tip of the day. This way, you will get fresh content on your site without always having to write it yourself. The increased exposure to search engine information seekers can dramatically drive qualified traffic.

Have Patience: Internet success doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't only come from traditional search engines. Your internet marketing strategy should include a variety of internet promotional techniques. Many of these promotional techniques are free, or for a small fee, or you can hire a service to do them for you. They do require a lot of effort and management, but the visitors to your website will be worth the work. If you promote your website properly, the traffic will come. If your product or service is good and priced fairly, and your website is effective, you have the formula for a internet success!

In the series of articles to follow, I will expand upon each of these sections to detail how you can use these internet marketing strategies to promote your own websites.

Free Internet Marketing Advice