Why Email Marketing Might Be the Golden Ticket for Your Business

• Category: Case Studies, Content, Email Marketing, Marketing
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You may be operating your business for just a few months or even a few years relying solely on mass snail-mail marketing campaigns. Postcards, mailers, and printed newsletter may have proved successful for you to some degree but in light of the economy and the need to streamline any business these days, it may be time to venture into the world of email marketing.

Here’s why:

Bigger Circulation Area

It is a lot of work to create, print, stamp and address thousands of marketing materials being mailed out. With email, all you need is one email address. No stamps, not printing, no wasted hours spent. Set up a form to grab addresses on your website and get the contact information for people you may not reach through print marketing campaigns. By establishing an email mailing list, you already have access to your target audience. There is less of hit-and-miss game of chance taking place.

Easier Access to Your Company

On print marketing materials, you include your name, address, telephone number and email address. All of which are necessary but not necessarily convenient for the potential customer. In an email marketing campaign, you can provide a direct link to your website or product page and all the reader needs to do is click twice to have access to your information. Recipients can also email you back immediately should they have questions.

Trackable Actions

If you use an email application for your email marketing campaign, you will be able to see who is doing what with your information. Different applications allow you to run different reports to see who clicked-through on the links, who opened the email, and more. This information is invaluable for helping you to decide what is working and what doesn’t. You can perfect your advertising campaigns as you go along.

More Acceptable

If you have been relying on cold calls to get the majority of your customers, you may already know many people don’t take too kindly to repetitive calls when they are busy. Sending email information is a less intrusive way to reach your target. Customers often will save the information in an email to come back to at a more convenient time. It will take several email contacts to gain attention but an email will likely be stored while a phone call is quickly forgotten.

Much More Affordable

Email marketing is beneficial especially to start-ups that have little marketing funds in the beginning. The costs of print ads and marketing materials can be tremendous. With email, however, the cost of a monthly service for email contact is reasonable and there is no need for a huge investment initially that may or may not pay off. Email is perhaps the most inexpensive form of marketing your business can use after word of mouth.

Up The Ante for Return Visitors

• Category: Content, SEO
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Getting traffic to your site is the general idea behind promoting your products and services online because every visitor is a potential customer for you. However getting visitors to repeatedly return to your site time and again is a powerful tool for converting visitors into buyers.

What does it take to bring a visitor back? There are a lot of ways you can keep increasing your traffic with return visits and it is your duty to find out which methods work and which do not. You can invest your time in focusing on what is working to keep bring people back to your expertise.

There are several techniques to use with your website including:

Electronic Newsletters

This is a great tool for bringing people back to your information. A newsletter done electronically is very simple. There are many websites that allow you to essentially fill in the blanks to produce a quality newsletter. Add a form to your website where people can input their email addresses. After you have constructed a decent email list, you can craft newsletters full of original information, articles, announcements, and deals. Whatever information your potential customer would find relevant is what can be added to a newsletter. You can then add the information into a news letter form and send out to all people are your existing list. Provide readers with a link to opt-out of receiving information and always remember to tout your website in every mailing. You can create and mail your newsletters at a pace you find consistent with what your readers what, whether it be weekly, bi-weekly, once a month, or quarterly.

Updates/Series

If you craft material in a series form or through regular updates, you inspire people to keep coming back and checking in for new information. Try to set a schedule to make it easy for people to remember when you’ll be updating your material. Stick with the schedule so as not to disappoint your readers.

Message Boards

Generating interest through a message board is a great way to keep people coming back and actively participating in your website. Not only is it good for traffic, but the information you learn from readers could be vital to your business. Incite different discussions or take to the message boards to answer frequently asked questions. Participating in the boards are a great way to connect with your core audience and build a level of trust in you and your expertise, and subsequently your products and services.

Sponsor Contests

You need to pick a tangible product or service that can be used in a giveaway or promotion. People will need to come to your site and register for entry into the contest. Through the world of social media, contests are spreading like wildfire. You can issues rules and regulations for contest participation that involves entrants using Twitter and Facebook to qualify for the prizes and thus further promoting your event. Give away something relevant and keep entrants posted about when to check back to find out who one. You can get a lot of bang out of a contest sponsorship so stay active in the process and follow through with the giveaway.

SEO and Article Writing

• Category: Content, SEO
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Marketing techniques for websites and blogs can take many different forms. One of the most common search engine optimization techniques is to use SEO articles. SEO are techniques that people use to help internet users find your website when they’re searching for information online. SEO articles are specially written articles that helps internet users land on your site.

The Top of the Search Engine Results

Anyone with a website has the same goal – to have lots of people finding their website and visiting the site. Unless you are using your website as a personal journal (and why would you do that in a public place?!) you have the goal of driving as many visitors to your website as possible. It doesn’t matter if you are providing information or selling products; it all starts with having a lot of visitors finding your website.

When people type words into Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines – they’re looking for information on a certain topic. One word typed into a search engine is a “keyword” while a series of words typed into a search engine is called a “keyword phrase”. For example, if you were using the internet to find information about parenting, you might type “parenting” into Google. If you wanted to get more specific results, you might type something like “parenting children with autism”. Websites that are relevant to what is being searched for would show up in the search engine results, with the most relevant sites displayed first.

As a website owner or blogger – you want your website to appear on the first page of search engine results for your relevant keywords and keyword phrases.

SEO Articles

One of the easiest and most consistent methods of positioning a website in the first page of search engine results is through the use of SEO articles. Article marketing can be done both on your website or blog and through posting on other sites. Because links on other sites pointing back to your site play an important role in the search engine positioning formula (where your site will appear in the search engine results when people search for information you provide) many web developers and bloggers will post articles related to the information found on their website on article directories and other blogs.
Each time you post an article on an article directory or another blog, make sure that it contains a link back to your site with one of your primary keywords or keyword phrases. This will help the search engines see that your site provides information about those keywords, and the more relevant it feels your website is about that topic, the higher your site will appear in the search engine results.

Common SEO Mistakes

• Category: Content, Google, SEO
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Unfortunately, the “if you build it, they will come” mentality doesn’t necessarily work when setting up a website. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if it’s not optimized for search engines, you won’t have very many visitors. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex subject that is constantly evolving. What works to get visitors to a website today may not work next week!

People who are not SEO experts commonly make the same type of mistakes. Mistakes in optimizing a website will affect the number of people who find your site when using Google or Yahoo or some other favorite search engine. Here are some common SEO mistakes that could be hurting your site:

Not Having Titles and Descriptions

When you use a website builder or blog software to create your website, often the title and description html tags are not automatically filled in for you. If you don’t go back to each of the individual pages on your website and include a page title and description, the search engines have a much harder time labeling your site and “understanding” what the website is about. Search engines literally read the title and description, then match the words found in those html tags with the phrases people are typing into search engines to find information.

Using Too Many Keywords

It used to be that websites needed to have keyword optimized content to have a chance at appearing in the search engine results when people typed those phrases into a search engine. Web developers and SEO experts would strive for their primary keywords to appear for a certain percentage of the total page’s content – like 5% for example.

Now, when creating content for web pages, it is not necessary to fit keywords into the content in any specific place or for a specific percentage of your overall content. When you provide information on a topic, you’ll naturally use keywords without forcing it. In fact, it is thought that using too many keywords in your content will actually result in lower search engine rankings than if you just write the information naturally.

Confusing or Difficult to Read Content

Another common mistake website and blog owners make is posting content that is confusing or difficult to understand. Content that is stuffed with keywords don’t make sense. Content that uses extremely long sentences and complicated vocabulary words will make the average reader click off your page in a hurry!

Keep your information easy to read with short sentences and every-day vocabulary. Experts say you should aim for content that reads at about an 8^th grade reading level.

Creating Fancy Websites Without SEO

Probably the most confusing and expensive mistake people make is to have a website built that is beautiful but has no search engine optimization at all! If a website has all the bells and whistles, amazing graphics, fancy navigational menus and video features people may be impressed by it – if only they could find it. If you search for some of the fanciest looking sites in Google with keywords about their topic and don’t find the website – that’s a problem. A website without search engine optimization is pointless. When putting together a website or blog, you need to consider search engine optimization as part of the design.

3 Top Content Marketing Strategies to Build Your Business

• Category: Content, Email Marketing, SEO, Social media
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If you are looking to build your business by having a presence on the web you should look to content marketing as a way to get started. Here are three of the most successful content marketing strategies.

Blog Posting

To begin with you should build and maintain your own high quality blog. This is a great way to start getting your name out as well as a means to show your expertise in your niche. It is one of the best way to convey to current and potential customers how and what you do. It is also a great way for search engines to pick you up.

It will be important to keep you blog updated regularly with quality content. Weekly at the very minimum but is better to post a few times a week, if you can. The longer the blog posts, the less often you will need to post.

Always make sure that you are accurately presenting your company in your blog posts and do not be afraid to show your expertise. Make sure the tone of your posts matches the business you are promoting.

After you have your own blog up and running it is also a good idea to do guest blogs on other sites. This expands your internet voice and allows you to reach even more potential customers.

Podcast and Video Blogging

Podcast and video marketing is up and coming and proving to be very successful. It allows you to target customers who do not like to read but would prefer to watch or listen to what you have to say. It is a more time consuming content marketing strategy, but generally worth the effort. Once you get used to making the podcasts they will come easier and be less time consuming. It is important to note that you do not need to update podcast and videos as often as written blogs. Updates once a month, especially at the beginning, are fine. As you get used to doing them you may want to update more often.

Email Newsletter

Email newsletters are one of the oldest forms of internet content marketing, but are still a viable means to maintain customers and obtain new ones. It is a great way to keep in touch with current customers, letting them know new products you may be offering and different promotions.

Build your email contact list by obtaining emails from all of your current customers and having a link on your blog where potential customers can sign up for it. As you are preparing your email newsletter make sure that it has good quality content. A great marketing strategy is to offer some type of promotion or discount with the newsletter. Email your newsletter out to all the customers in your email data base and consider posting it on your blog as well.

With all three content marketing strategies make sure that customers have a place to post or send feedback and comments. This can be a great way to learn what content customers like and want more of and what they just simply may not be interested in at all.