Website Marketing: Usability for the Already-Awesome
Website marketing is as much about getting repeat visitors, and gaining a reputation as a great company, as it is dragging new visitors into the maw of your website! One of the golden rules of website marketing is that if you build it, they will come … and if you make it easy for people, they will come back. Today we check out how already good, highly usable websites can take steps towards being even better. There are four general concepts in website marketing and improvement that can help you build upon an already great design: * Study your ’safe flights’, not your ‘accidents’ * Look at things that might go wrong, and work to make sure they don’t * Look more broadly, at enterprise usability * Look for needs that you didn’t know existed Study your ’safe flights’, not your ‘accidents’ Historically, airlines improved safety by studying what happened when a plane had an accident. Now, airline safety is still a major issue (despite the fact that flying is safer than swimming in the ocean, riding a bike or driving a car), but experts study the safe flights instead, to see what went right among all of them. In your website marketing, look at exactly what makes it easy for your visitors to do something on your site - and then look for any areas that don’t meet the expectation. Look at things that might go wrong, and work to make sure they don’t An accident waiting to happen is as good as an accident … especially on the Internet where you deal with such high volumes of traffic etc. If your contact form is a bit dodgy or your Flash is old, upgrade it before it starts to make things hard for people. Look more broadly, at enterprise usability Don’t just make sure your website works well for people that are already familiar with your industry and products - make sure your entire business concept makes sense to people. Look for needs that you didn’t know existed Sometimes this may mean an opportunity to broaden and diversify your business. Sometimes it might just mean adding a piece of information to the website that you didn’t know users needed. The best way to get this information is to simply ask your users - pop a little site survey on, or run a focus group. There are plenty of website marketing firms that can help out! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

D?Oh! 5 Search Engine Submission Mistakes
Your site copy is polished, the design looks pretty neat, you’ve even got a few Flash graphics on your home page, and you’re ready to do your search engine submissions. STOP!! Today we check out the top 5 mistakes that people doing search engine submissions for their site make. In the interest of doing things right from the start, preserving your cash and effectively using your website promotion time, here are 5 things to make sure of before you have your internet marketing firm start on search engine submissions. 1. Check that your site is search engine friendly first In many cases, search friendliness means ‘human friendliness’; however there are also a few additional things you’ll need to take note of. Make sure that: * You have descriptive titles on every page that match the content * Your copy is written for people, not ‘keyword stuffed’ * You’ve included every page of your site in the main navigation. In other words, ensure that one of the main menu options can eventually lead you to every page on your site. * Make sure each page can be accessed by means other than Flash navigation or Java navigation. 2. Start your link building activities before you do search engine submissions Your website will start out with a much better ranking if you start your link building activities before doing all of your submissions. Star getting some article marketing content and press release out in the big wide web, do a few directory submissions, etc. 3. Create a system to monitor your search engine submissions You’ll want to know whether the search engines are indexing every single page on your website, and how frequently they are updating your listing. This is especially important if you are still in the process of adding content to your site. 4. Test your site marketability In the end, having a website isn’t about just ‘getting good Google results’; having a website is about being profitable. Use Google AdSense as a tool for discovering which taglines, keywords, entice visitors to your site, and also encourage them to ‘convert’ - not just look around and leave. 5. Forgetting your analytics If you don’t want to fall victim to John Wanamaker’s famous dilemma (”Half of the money I spend on advertising is completely wasted … I just have no idea which half”), you’ll want to implement analytics on your site. In the interests of getting complete and comprehensive data and an accurate baseline to measure from, do your search engine submissions after you’ve implemented your web analytics. Bookmark to: Hide Sites

9 Common Mistakes in Online Advertising with PPC
PPC online advertising can seem easy on paper. It’s only 140 characters, just make sure you have some cool copywriting and enough cash to get top spot, and you’ll make a ton of cash, right? Well, maybe. If you don’t make any of these common mistakes, it’s possible! 1. Bidding too narrowly The more closely your keyword matches with a search, the higher it will be displayed. The less common that keyword is, the less you’ll pay for a click, and the higher your profit margin. So, focus on every low-volume variation of your high volume keywords! 2. Forgetting to include your location People would rather work with someone close by … even if they never see you, and only order online. Just a fact! 3. Being #1 obsessed A far higher percentage of results further down the list get clicks in paid search compared to natural search. You’ll often get plenty of clicks in second or third spot, and pay far less for them. 4. Including phone numbers People look at them … but they don’t use them! A waste of valuable characters. 5. Trying to fit in If you want to be successful with PPC, you have to be brave enough to stand out and be yourself. 6. Not updating your copy throughout the year PPC is a short-term strategy - don’t be afraid to take a short-term approach in your copy. Update it with the shopping seasons, current events, etc. 7. Not tracking Some people don’t know what tracking is. Some people don’t know how to. Some people believe it’s a waste of time. Either way, the net result is a campaign that costs more than it should and doesn’t deliver to its potential. 8. Not using the ‘negative’ folder If you check out the searches that your ad is displayed for, you’ll probably find a lot of people searching for free versions of your products, searching your keywords with the word ‘cheap’, and searching for your service along with the word ‘jobs’. There’s no point paying for clicks from people who want things for free or very cheap, or simply want a job in your industry. 9. Ignoring your own company name This is especially relevant for big businesses. Often other people will try to piggyback on your success by bidding on your business name as a PPC online advertising keyword. Bookmark to: Hide Sites

Analytics and Online Marketing - 5 Simple Tips
Web analytics can be a little like a maze … you are stuck in the middle of many different corridors of information, some a little lighter than others, but not at all sure where any of them lead. Today we look at 5 of the basic analytics tips that can really make a difference to your online marketing … giving you at least 5 different paths through that maze! Watch your basics stats Your basic web analytics statistics that make a difference to your online marketing success are: * Bounce rate (how many people leave immediately after viewing a page) * Number of page views * Time spent on site * Time spent per page (although this can be misleading if people load several pages in tabs and then flick through each one) * Errors (shows you where things need fixing) * Browser used (show you which browsers you should test your site with) * Referrer (where did they come from?) * Exit point (where did they go - or what page did they leave from?) Look at your reports within a specified date range Whenever you make a change to your website, watch what happens in your analytics. Watch the times when your site saw the most activity, and when it saw the least. If you’re using Google Analytics, it’s pretty simple - just click on the dates in the calendar to select. Know why you’re using analytics In regular advertising, there are very few reliable and easy ways to know what impact and reception your tactics are finding in the real world. It is all too easy to become comfortable with this concept in the online world. Analytics are your single best way to know whether the money you’re spending is being returned, what value customers find in your business and how they relate to it. Unfortunately, you’ll find many of your online competitors DO use analytics, and therefore are more in-tune with your audience, and cost-effective than you. Be consistent Make sure you look at your analytics regularly, to get a feel for what things are ‘usually’ like on your website. You’ll be able to spot if something out of the ordinary happens, and hopefully fix it before it has a major impact on your online marketing! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

Blah-Blah Copy: An Internet Marketing Strategy Killer!
There’s a time and a place for conversations. Indeed, while the phone, the kitchen table and the train station are all excellent conversation-hosting venues, these days it is more usual to have a conversation in virtual terms. Blogs are good conversation platforms … your main website is not. Today we’re talking about blah-blah copy - the friendly introductory text that works so well in blogs, but can really kill your internet marketing strategy when used in the wrong spot. What’s blah-blah text … and how can you effectively get rid of it? What’s blah blah copy? The first two sentences of this post are blah-blah copy. I’m providing a general lead-in to the topic … letting you know that the internet is about conversations, and there is a time and a place for them … and providing a few visual, easy-to-relate to examples so that you can ease into the subject. However, if this was a sales-focused page on a website, it would be outta there! Why kill it? Eye tracking studies show that almost all users skip the introductory text and go straight to content that has an associated action. For example, people look for bulleted lists, product specifications, links that can be clicked, on a website first of all. If nothing is forthcoming, they might go back and look for clues in what looked like blah-blah copy, but usually they’ll just try to muddle through. If you force your readers to wade through blah-blah text to get to the juicy stuff (instead of highlighting it with bolding, bullets, links etc), it will make your website seem like a lot of work. And people don’t know that you’re worth all that effort … so they go somewhere else! Should I get rid of my blah-blahs altogether? It depends on their purpose. If you look back over a sentence on a main marketing or sales page and decide you were trying to: * Help the reader feel welcome * Engage with the reader on a personal level * Be funny You should kill the sentence. However, if your purpose is to make it easier for people to find what they need, or provide direction for the rest of the content, you should keep it … just ‘keep it’ to a minimum! Blah-blah copy is only bad for your Internet marketing strategy when you forget that your visitors have come to your website for a purpose! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

5 More Things Everyone Wants to Know About Redirected Targeted Traffic
There are so many businesses out there that have an awesome product, and the potential to be millionaires … if only they could connect with the people who are searching for them! Google alone doesn’t usually do the job - that’s why newspaper, television and radio advertising aren’t dead in the water. Redirected targeted traffic is one more piece of the exposure puzzle - here are 5 more facts that everyone wants to know about it! 1. Will redirected targeted traffic make me more money? The law of averages says yes! If you’ve been generating around a 3% conversion rate on your site already, you can expect around the same from any targeted traffic you buy. Non-targeted traffic, of course, would be another story! 2. Don’t targeted traffic sites use fake generator programs to create ‘hits’ on my site? There are plenty of scammers on the Internet, and not all of them are Nigerian princesses. Check out the customer testimonials, the Better Business Bureau record and online reviews of any company you are thinking about working with - you’ll soon be able to spot those that deliver real traffic! You can also check your raw server logs to see that all paid visitors have been delivered. 3. Is this the same as spamming people? No. Redirected targeted traffic comes from people that are already searching for a site related to yours, it doesn’t promote your site through mass emailings. 4. Why does the traffic come in such a staggered way? Sometimes there will be periods when your redirected targeted traffic stops for a day, sometimes it will deliver hundreds of people in 12 hours. This is because real people don’t work to any sort of mathematical formula (as you have probably noticed!) - if your targeted traffic provider is sending real people, you just need to go with the flow. 5. Doesn’t redirected targeted traffic all come from India or Russia … places where people don’t have the money to buy my products? Actually, it is very easy to geo-target a traffic campaign based on the IP address - so not if you choose a provider that offers geo-targeting! Redirected targeted traffic is just another of the many wonders of the modern age … fairly simple technology that can do amazing things for your business! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

Can I Outsource My Linkbait Posts to a Link Building Service?
Link baiting is a new concept in building up link popularity. The idea is that, instead of spending many hours creating ‘easy’ content to get a higher quantity of links, that you spend slightly more time initially creating a ‘highly valuable’ piece of content … and that links will naturally flow from that. However, linkbaiting is fairly different to the standard tasks that link building services perform for companies. Can you outsource your linkbait posts to a link building service? Read on to find out! What constitutes linkbait? There are six main types of linkbait posts: * Informational posts * News posts (must be fresh!) * Humor posts * Tool posts (must be new, not available elsewhere) * Widget hooks * Evil hooks (being controversial or criticizing a popular person) What do link building services do? When you consider what link building services do, day to day, it is easier to see why most don’t offer a ‘link baiting’ service. Link building services will: * Submit your site to web directories in a measured way * Syndicate your press releases across the web and sometimes write them for you * Syndicate your articles across the web (and sometimes write them for you) * Write short comments on blogs linking back to your URL So, can I get linkbaiting done through my link building service? Generally not. Link building services are set up to take the legwork and time out of building a link profile on the net. They usually aren’t set up to put in massive time investments on pieces that may or may not return a lot of links. And besides, it’s better to write your linkbaiting posts yourself because: * If you create a tool, you can make sure its useful to your own company * If you write an informational post, you can ensure it’s comprehensive and has correct, up-to-date industry info * If you write a humor post, you can ensure that the humor matches with your corporate values and won’t alienate customers Link baiting is an awesome way to boost your link popularity score; however, it won’t replace standard link building services anytime soon! The high risk/potential high reward of link baiting, mixed with the zero risk/solid return that link building services guarantee will always go hand in hand … but should always be performed by different entities! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

Deliverability Tips for Email Blast Advertising
Email blast advertising (paired with well thought-out campaign ideas) has plenty of power to get visitors to your site, and dollars into your business bank account. However, email blast advertising that never reaches an inbox does nobody any good! Today we check out the top tips for making sure your email blast messages get past their first significant hurdle, and actually reach the inbox. 1. Require double opt-in: Require people to enter their email address on the site, and then activate their subscription by clicking on the link sent in your introductory email to reduce the number of not-quite-sure receivers and mistyped email addresses 2. Send your messages at a consistent time: Create a routine for sending out your email blast advertising messages - ISPs are less likely to automatically mark the message as spam when it arrives according to a pattern. 3. Use consistent sender information: If you change the Sender info, people may have to add a new address to their email whitelist in order to receive your messages. Many people simply won’t realize they have to do that, and become instant dead ends in your marketing when you change your ‘from’ address. 4. Put your unsubscribe link at the top: Because if people can’t find that little link amongst all the junk at the bottom, they might just hit the ‘Junk’ button instead, damaging your rep and creating spam complaints to deal with in the process. 5. Use a static IP address: If you have a dynamic IP address shared with other businesses, what they do with their IP might very well affect your reputation. Use your own IP and keep it the same to help ensure deliverability. 6. Remind people to whitelist you: Some ISPs record the number of times your email address is added to a whitelist, and consider it a sign of trust. 7. Don’t stress about spam words: There are some words that are considered to be ’spammy’ across the board, and folk wisdom says that these emails are less likely to be delivered. This isn’t backed up by evidence, however, when applied to generalized words like ‘Special’, ‘Free’, ‘Discount’, ‘Win’, etc. It’s actually pretty simple to ensure that your email blast advertising messages get delivered - the longer you choose not to check the above tips, though, the more likely your Sender reputation will be damaged! Bookmark to: Hide Sites

Is the Yahoo Internet Directory Submission Still Worth It?
In any comprehensive guide to link building from scratch, the authors will tell you how essential it is that you get a link from the Yahoo Directory. Along with DMOZ, it is often considered as essential to Internet marketing success as owning a website! This single Internet directory submission costs $299 each and every year, though … is the single link still worth it? We look at the issue from several different perspectives today. In the past… Prior to October 2002, most of the search results on the Yahoo portal were driven by the sites listed in the Yahoo Directory. That little Internet directory submission could get you a lot of search traffic. In 2002, though, Yahoo switched to delivering search results via Google’s algorithm, so the directory entry meant a lot less. Link popularity Yahoo still delivers link popularity value. Yahoo is an important site, and thus a link from this domain will help boost your search engine rankings more than most other sites would. However! Given the fact that the listing $300 each and every year, it doesn’t deliver anywhere near as much value as you might expect. If you could spend $300 getting an expert to land you a valuable, one-way, permanent link on an .edu or .gov site, the cash would be far better spent. Your listing and the search results Some people argue that being listed in the Yahoo Directory improves the ‘look’ of your result for a natural search. However, you need to remember that your category in the Yahoo Directory is listed along with your actual URL, and many SEO surveys find that surfers pass over an individual site in favor of searching within the category at dir.yahoo.com instead. Commercial versus non-commercial sites One piece of good news is that non-commercial sites can do their Internet directory submission to Yahoo for free. We aren’t sure of exactly where Yahoo draws the line at calling a site ‘non-commercial’, however. For example, a blog site that is heavy with PPC advertising is obviously making revenue from the traffic - yet the blog itself is non-commercial. You can probably expect that Yahoo will change the rules on these borderline sites at some stage, also. Bookmark to: Hide Sites

3 Most Common Questions About Distributing Press Releases
If you read enough press releases, it is pretty easy to get an innate feel for how to write them. However, there isn’t really an easy way to ‘get a feel’ for the other important aspect of creating your own news, that is, distributing press releases. Luckily, most of the questions about distributing press releases follow the same lines - we answer them here! Top 3 questions about distributing press releases * Are the only good press release distribution sites the paid ones? * Can I do my own press release distribution? * Is there a list of all the free press release sites on the web? Are the only good press release distribution sites the paid ones? Not at all. In fact, the most valuable portal for distributing your press release is via the Associated Press website - which doesn’t cost a dime. You will need some pretty spectacular news to get published there, though! In short, there are some good paid sites, some bad paid sites, some good free sites and some bad free sites. Experience is the best way to tell one from the other … that, or borrowing the experience of a company that has done a lot of press releases distribution. Can I do my own press release distribution? You can. However, you’ll need to keep in mind that you’ll have to create an account with every site, learn the lurks and perks of each one, and be prepared to put in a lot of time on not-very-specialized work. In most cases, it is more cost-effective to keep working, and pay somebody else for distributing press releases for you, than to save a few dollars, but put in many hours. Is there a list of all the free press release sites on the web? There are a couple published across the web … but read them cautiously, with the caveat that just because something is free, doesn’t mean it has any value to you! Distributing press releases is a task that is simple, but time-consuming … and one that is best outsourced, if your time has any value to you! Bookmark to: Hide Sites