Tag: Marketing & Promotion

Despite all the discussion about social media, video, and other marketing channels, good old email marketing is still one of the best forms of customer contact.

That being the case, email marketing remains difficult for some businesses. The challenge comes with converting subscribers to new customers and existing customers into repeat customers.

The businesses today are all about growing and expanding. With the rapid growth in the field of science and technology, it is not difficult for the business owners to plan out a new product or service and expand the niche of their targeted user groups. But how exactly do you spread out the word about the same? How do you inform the users that a new product or service is in the pipeline and that they should anticipate the arrival of the same at the earliest?

Clichés may tend to mask the ugly, complicated state of affairs, but there is usually some aspect of truth behind them. The idea that ‘content is king’ has become the mantra of many white hat search agencies, and the belief that creating great content is the key to having a well-performing website is widely held. This content can include anything from sales copy, editorial content, videos, images and even audio.

Firstly let’s take a look at what makes guest blogging such an attractive option to launch a blog into prized Google territory. A few years ago top bloggers decided to embrace other blog owners as a guest on their sites and submit an article or two. What they noticed shortly after is an increase in traffic and readership, with some even garnering an increase in search engine rankings. They kept this dirty little secret to themselves and simply kept the practice going amongst their inner circle.

Whether it's your first website or your fiftieth, there's something exhilarating about purchasing that domain and taking part in a new site building venture. But what happens between the domain purchase and site launch? Often, a blank canvas with great potential lays vacant on the web while site building is in progress. Many companies are beginning to catch on, and a new trend of building practical “coming soon” pages has emerged in the web design community. So, you ask: why should I spend time and resources on a coming soon page?

Whether you work for other companies or run your own business, you can't ignore Facebook as a marketing tool. While marketers are flocking to Facebook, many are really screwing up the opportunity this platform provides. Fortunately, you can learn from the mistakes that other Facebook marketers are making:

There are certain things that need to be done at the beginning of every link building campaign. Most people will do proper keyword research and find proper landing pages, after that they might check competitors to see where they got their backlinks as well as to figure out which types of pages are most linked. That info can come along handy and can be used to implement a solid link building strategy. However, there is one more thing that is needed when starting a link building campaign and that is link consolidation.

Understanding the nuances of pay per click marketing, Google AdWords, and SEO is not something that happens overnight. There is the complexity of how individual visitors choose to interact with websites, in addition to the way keywords influence the frequency rate and position of advertising on popular search engines. The importance of any given keyword can change literally in the span of a day, and dramatically impact the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign. Of course, without extensive study, practice, and knowledge, it’s impossible to accurately predict or even simply react to daily changes in metrics and other analytical data.

It seems that all sorts of businesses want you to like them... on Facebook that is. Today's businesses have realized the power of social media in finding new customers and keeping in touch with existing ones. As such, there has been a rush of businesses that put up their own social media pages. Two of the most popular are Facebook's pages and Twitter. But the reality is your social media efforts would only go down the drain if people don't follow you or like you. It would be like a website that nobody visits. So how do you get them to follow you on Facebook/Twitter? Here are some tips.

I often wonder whether there is a world beyond SEO. You may call it rhetoric but to me this seems to be an important matter especially when I see the hoopla surrounding online marketing. There seems to be an unseemly focus on finding a place on the first page of search results and in the process everyone seems to forget that all this effort is to sell a product or service. In fact, it looks as if there is no purpose except to win the search contest. In this confusion of identifying the ultimate goal we may be missing the woods for the trees.

As Internet users have changed their online behavior, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing have become increasingly and inexorably intertwined.  SEO leverages social media marketing to drive Internet users to a site. Social media marketing utilizes SEO techniques to connect with Internet users. Google and Bing are not going anywhere soon, and neither are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In military terms, the challenge for business is how to combine these two ‘pincers’ in order to ‘envelope’ their target audience.

When you engage in competitive analysis, you need to be prepared for the tasks ahead. Your research will require significant analytical comprehension, insight and strong reasoning skills. In order to understand your statistics, consider how each point relates to the next and place your analysis in a larger context. Don't be afraid to use any statistical tool out there to double check the validity of your statistical conclusion.

There are a lot of SEO companies that offer all kinds of services to webmasters. As soon as you try using a few of them, it seems that they fall into two categories: those which produce poor results and those which are too expensive. Which ones would you choose?

As most in the industry know, SEO is a constantly evolving discipline. No one technique works to the same level of effectiveness for any great length of time, and as mediums and platforms evolve, so must those who work to passively or aggressively manipulate them.

I freelance for a couple of guys who partnered up and built themselves a growing and successful full service SEO company. They recently brought in a third partner, an MBA with a marketing background, to help them build and promote their own brand. Flush with clients, they had nonetheless neglected their own ‘brand.’  While their clients’ keywords garnered top rankings on Google, their own website was – for all intents and purposes – largely ‘invisible’ to Google for their relevant keywords.

There is a simple pain point for social media marketers – “If it is not measurable – it is not manageable”. Whenever you are approaching a client to convince for social media marketing, they would invariably look for return on their investment. They would ask questions like – what is engagement and how do you measure it! Here are some tools that can help you to monitor social media marketing efforts:

TweetedRanks is a free, web based tool, that allows users to set up tracking bots to monitor the Google positions for selected keywords. Every tracked keyword adds a day to the amount of time between reports (so at 1 keyword tracked you get daily updates, whilst 2 keyword updates come every other day and so on). The fun part about the tool is that it sends the results as a private message to users Twitter and GTalk accounts.

DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) has continued to become more popular among people who set up PPC campaigns. Some marketers have considered it their most prized secret, while others consider it common knowledge. Regardless, just like any tool, if you don't understand how to use it correctly, then it will cause more harm than good. Here is a quick look at what exactly DKI is, how to use it, and some tips to using it effectively.

There is an interesting divide in internet marketing. It is miles long, utterly nonsensical, and potentially devastating in regards to long-term profitability and diverse income. Like a sport rivalry or lengthy lack of interest, this single skill divide separates different types of marketers, preventing joint ventures and limiting the power of method-based partnerships.

The top buzzword for 2010 is “conversions.” Why has this become such a hot topic? The reason is that your website is like a gigantic funnel, out of which pop a precious few sales or web leads. Most online marketing efforts have been focused on traffic acquisition (search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, banner advertising, etc.) up until now, because these efforts can be made without touching the sacred cow of modern digital marketing: the corporate website.

Google recently opened its doors to AdWords users that are interested in Beta testing ACE, the AdWords Campaign Experiment tool. This tool is designed to allow campaign managers to do real-time split testing on their campaigns. Currently, experiments can be done based upon keywords, ad groups, placements, and bids. This tool will eliminate the need of for lengthy before and after tests in order to determine whether or not potential changes could be beneficial to your AdWords campaign.

Google has recently released some of the reports from the beta testing that has taken place in Canada and the UK. Google Adwords has released a new function known as Broad Match Modifiers. It will limit your broad match keywords, but not as much as phrase match keywords. It is essentially, the happy middle ground. As will all new releases, there are some important facts that you need to know about.

Search Funnels are the latest in tracking wizardry announced by Google AdWords. This particular innovation allows advertisers to track the search behavior of their conversions over a period of time, rather than from the most recent click on Google.com.

Drupal is widely acknowledged to be a powerful, extensible and easy-to-use content management system with ever-expanding capabilities. It may come as no surprise, then, that in its initial configuration, Drupal is fairly well set up for search engine optimization. However, there are several important steps you can take to ensure that you’re getting the most out of Drupal and maximizing your chances of climbing to the top of the search engine rankings.