Internet Marketing Tips to Consider Before Going Online
It's a rarity for businesses to not operate a website these days. Even small mom-and-pop shops that began long before the era of the Internet have gone digital, albeit some were a little more hesitant than others. But while launching a website - whether for a multi-national, bÃllion dollar corporation or the local pizza place - may be easy, to have that website actively help grow the business is another matter all together.
Simply having a website (one among the ever-expanding billions) isn't enough to earn a business any attention, promote its brand or grow its profit margins. Search engine optimization, the practice of making changes in different areas of a website so that search engines can help find and deliver targeted audiences to the site, is practically meaningless unless companies first consider several issues.
The first issue to launching a successful site is determining the purpose of that site. Is a business looking to generate leads or sales? Is the site simply a branding tool, perhaps to promote a new line of products? It's critical to decide what actions the site is supposed to encourage visitors to take. Say the website's goal is to encourage visitors to call an office. Are there phones and staff ready to handle the incoming calls when the site delivers them? Having a call to action for website visitors but no follow through on the company side is just as bad as having no call to action in the first place.
Next, a business needs to take a serious look at who its audience is. This should have been decided when first developing a business plan, but maybe the demographic need to be tweaked for online audiences. Different demographics - Millennials vs Boomers for instance - approach the Internet in different ways and businesses should carefully hone in on the best prospects.
Finally, businesses need to realistically determine competition. While the audiences might be the same, the Gap is not necessarily competing with a local boutique in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's important to consider geographic and business factors when determining true competition. Who is directly competing in the same market space, with the same products and looking to target a similar audience. While both the Gap and the boutique are clothing stores, they cater to different clientele and operate on much different budgets. At the end of the day, that local boutique cannot compete with the advertising budget of the Gap, so it should look to be competing with the other boutique across town.
Many of the aforementioned factors should already exist in a business plan or marketing plan. But it is easy to forget the basics when faced with the daunting task of implementing a successful website and SEO plan to promote it. There are several tools that exist to help a business determine the best keywords for its site, provide the traffic sources of its competitor's site and grade the site on its content, trust value and more. Once the ground work is in place, successful, long term SEO and SEM strategies can be created.
Once a business has determined the site's purpose, audience and competition, then it is time to consider website structure and website navigation.
While both of these can be modified over time, based on consumer response and SEO results, it is important to design the website to be as fluid and easy to navigate as possible. The structure and navigation feed directly into the overall user-experience, which is a crucial thing to be aware of.
The website's design should reflect its goals. If the goal is to sell a product, it should be evident from the home page and carry throughout the rest of the site. If the website was designed to generate business, it should have the proper tools to help convert visits into actions.
Perhaps there is a "Contact Us" form on every page, so the user doesn't have to go looking for it back on the home page. Maybe the company's phone number is strategically listed several times on a webpage, pushing the call to action even more.
A business's website should make it easy for the user to conduct business. Pages that are complicated, difficult to navigate or cluttered detract from the user-experience, often causing users to leave the site altogether and finding another company to do business with.
While a site's structure and navigation needs to be firmly in place before even beginning to create an SEO campaign to promote it, it is important to keep SEO practices in mind when developing the website. Creating each page as its own point of entry makes it easier for the search engine spiders to locate specific keywords and direct the user towards that page. If the website is structured appropriately, several pages may rank in the search engine in addition to the homepage. The more pages from the site that rank, the greater chance a business has of getting the interested user to reach its site.
Suppose there is a business that supplies restaurant furniture for chain restaurants. Its website should have a different page for each product that it sells- tables, chairs, counters, etc. Depending on how many products are in each category, the website could delve even deeper, creating pages for the different types of chairs - booth seats, stools, patio seating, etc. As the pages get more specific, so do the keywords. That way, should a restaurant owner be looking for stainless stéel bar stools, the search engines can automatically pull up that page of the website.
Search engine optimization is a long term process. There are many factors that contribute to the success of a SEO or SEM campaign. Some are easy to identify and others require careful analysis. But the first thing a business can do to help itself is to create a website that is well designed, structured and has a clear purpose. -Nick Stamoulis
Twelve Simple Ways to Generate More Blog Traffic
Imagine that you've taken the giant leap to start a blog to bring more brand awareness and exposure to your small business. You've taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you make your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You are as proud of this post as if it truly were your flesh and blood. And, most of all you can't wait to share it with the world. So, you hit "publish" and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. However, the waiting is an endless ordeal. Why aren't you generating any comments? Why aren't people emailing you thrilled that you have shared your expertise with them? It's called "lack of traffic" and if there's no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it. So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are twelve quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:
1. Create Great Content Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or provide a solution to your readers' problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.
2. Keep Your Posts Short We are living in an age where short attention spans are the norm. Keep your posts under 500 words so that you don't lose your ADD readers.
3. Get Your Blog Indexed in Technorati This is the big daddy of all blog catalogs. Make sure that you go through the very simple process of submitting your blog RSS feed to Technorati.
4. Submit Your Blog Feed to Other Top Blog Catalogs Blog catalogs and RSS feed catalogs are where readers go to find blogs to read. You want to make sure that your blog is there. To make the process even easier, you can use a service such as SubmitINMe to manually post to the catalogs for you.
5. Entice Your Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog Give your readers a free goodie (such as a downloadable ebook, whitepaper, audio class, etc.) if they subscribe to your blog.
6. Let Your Social Networks Know About New Postsbr> Whenever you post to your blog, Tweet it out to your followers, update your LinkedIn status and let your Facebook friends and fans know about it. If it's a good post, they will pass it on to their community as well.
7. Get Involved in the Blog Community Blogging is a social activity. Read other blogs, comment on other blogs and refer to other blogs within your blog posts.
8. Comment Back When your readers make comments on your blog, make sure that you comment back to them. You want to encourage a natural back and forth dialogue between you and your readers.
9. Participate in a Blog Carnival A blog carnival is a blog event that it is dedicated to a particular top
ic and is published either weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of an article that contains links to other blog posts on that particular topic. Blog carnivals can be a wonderful way to produce awareness around your blog. Read the rules and regulations of the blog carnival and get involved.
10. Offér to Write a Blog Post for a High-Traffic Blog Research various blogs within your particular industry. Read the blogs, comment on the blogs and interact with the blogger. Once you've established a relationship, send them an email politely letting them know that you would be willing to be a guest blogger for them at any time in the future. Include a link to your blog so that they can check out the quality of your work.
11. Use Your Blog Posts in Your Ezine Instead of writing a brand new article for your weekly ezine, send out the first few paragraphs of one of your past blog posts. Then include a link for the reader to continue reading the post on your blog.
12. Include Your Blog URL in Your Email Signature Develop an email signature that you use whenever you send an email. Of course, your email signature should include a link to your blog. Once you implement these twelve strategies, you'll certainly notice a spike in traffic and begin generating comments and interaction from hundreds (even thousands) of readers in your particular industry.
By Jessica Swanson
We wish to welcome the continuation of capitalmediaworks.com.ph to the Infinity Domain Hosting family.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Find us on
