NC Internet Marketing Blog

Last night, I was a panelist at Social Media Club RDU where we discussed how social media impacts organizations and which department within the company is responsible for managing social media activities.

While we didn’t come up with a consensus decision on who actually owns social media we did have a very thorough exploration of the topic.

We also discussed some of the best ways to leverage social media and mobile marketing in your promotional efforts including some innovative ways to effectively use twitter, facebook, ning, linkedin and other social networks.

Watch the video and let me know your thoughts…

Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, mobile marketing, smcrdu, social marketing, social media, twitter

Actually, it’s probably closer to 1% of your advertising that works, at the most. Your newspaper ad, radio commercial or direct mail piece might reach 100,000 people and if you’re really lucky, it gets you a hundred customers… but you’d only know that if you actually had a way to accurately track the results.

It still amazes me how many business owners spend tens of thousands of dollars on advertising without even trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  

Most simply rely on asking their customers “So how did you hear about us?” and just make a mental note of which response they get the most instead of actually keeping track of the responses in a spreadsheet or notebook. Of course this also assumes that you can actually get your employees to ask the question on a regular basis and that your customers actually remember how they first learned about you. Fat chance!

There’s really no excuse for it since there are lots of cheap and simple ways to track your offline advertising including coupons, special offer codes, specific website addresses and trackable phone lines or extensions. Yet most of the business owners I meet don’t utilize them or track them properly.

The good news is, on the Internet, EVERYTHING is trackable and testable. You can precisely determine:

Honestly, the amount of data you can capture and analyze is overwhelming. Luckily there are only a few that are critical to monitor on a regular basis.

Adding this tracking functionality to your website is really simple too. All you typically need to do is copy and paste a small snippet of javascript code to the bottom of each page on your website.

The cheapest way to start tracking these statistics on your website is to use Google Analytics since it’s completely Free and is one of the best website analytics tools on the market. You can get a free account thru your existing Adwords administration interface or by going to http://www.google.com/analytics if you are not yet an Adwords advertiser.

Once you create your account you simply enter your domain name and Google will give you the code to paste into your website pages. Check back in 24 hours and as long as your website has gotten some visitors, you’ll be able to see your stats.

We actually have our own analytics tool that we use for our clients that is a lot easier to use than Google Analytics and provides more information in an easier to understand format. We also provide trackable phone numbers that you can use both online and offline to track your response from specific advertisements.  If you’re interested in either of these services just email us at tracking@gearedlocal.com

Getting as much qualified traffic to your website is definitely one of the most important factors to your online success but in the same way that just having a website doesn’t do you any good if no one can find it, having a website that doesn’t generate new leads or customers doesn’t do you any good no matter how much traffic it gets. (unless your business model is to get paid when people leave)

Therefore, the other thing you want to make sure you do is to test different variations of your landing pages so you can determine which combination of elements generate the highest number of leads or sales.

Google’s Free website optimizer and the landing page software we mentioned earlier (http://www.landingpagetool.com)  both allow you to test any combination of content to find out what leads to the most conversions. You will get a detailed report which shows you exactly which combination of elements worked best.

The elements you should test are:

Testing is crucial to your success. You should always be testing everything you do. You never know which tiny change can have a dramatic effect on your results. So before you start spending a lot of money to promote  your site, you should really make sure that the page you send them to is converting as good as possible. Note: You can still buy traffic to test your page, just keep it throttled down at first.

Technorati Tags: analytics, coupon advertising, new media marketing, newspaper advertising, radio advertising, small business marketing, split testing, website optimization, yellow page advertising

If you’re not already aware, Google is the largest Internet search engine with over 60% of all web searches. It has indexed billions of internet web pages and is known for its ease of use and quick, relevant results.

The problem is when most people do a search, they only look at the Top 10 or 20 results. If you’re website is not listed on these first 2 pages then you essentially don’t exist.

Google uses incredibly complicated and secret algorithms to determine which web sites are the most relevant results for whatever the user is searching for.

Unfortunately, getting your website to show up on the 1^st or 2^nd page of results when someone searches for your product or service is often not an easy task although the social bookmarking tactics we just shared with you in Secret Tactic #4 can have a dramatic effect.

In order to rank well, your website also has to be built in a technically optimized, search engine friendly fashion by your web developer. Sadly most web developers don’t know how to do this properly because the search engines change their algorithms so frequently that It’s hard for a web developer to stay on top of all the changes and most view it as marketing’s job, not theirs.

Your website also needs to have the proper words in page titles, headings, on the page content and in your navigation links.

Then you also need to gather as many “votes” as you can in the form of links from other websites.  Google doesn’t trust you. So they look at what others are saying about you to determine what your web pages are about. They do this by looking at which sites link to you and the words they use in the link when linking to you. The more sites you have linking to you and the more those sites have established themselves as trusted authorities on your topic, the better your rankings. Again, this is where social bookmarking is really powerful for building links quickly instead of having to email hundreds of webmasters.

However, this is all a very labor intensive and time consuming task with no guarantees that you’ll even succeed. There are lots of other factors that also need to be taken into account. We’ve been doing this since 1996 so over the years we’ve figured out some of the tricks to expediting the process from the average 6-8 months to 2-3 weeks and sometimes just days but that’s whole ‘nother  report we only share with our clients.

So how do you guarantee that your business will be found on Google when someone is searching for you?

Simple, you bid to be there anytime someone enters specific words or phrases related to your business.

It works like this: You tell Google which terms you want your ad to appear for and you enter the maximum amount your willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. If you’re maximum bid amount is higher than the other businesses bidding on the same or similar terms, your ad will be displayed. However, you won’t actually be charged your bid amount until the user clicks on your ad and is taken to your landing page. If they don’t click, it costs you nothing to be there and you just built some brand awareness for FREE.  (Note: In reality it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic jist of it.)

The program is called Google Adwords.  This is how Google makes the majority of its money. And we’re not talking about a little bit of money. We’re talking about nearly $5 Billion dollars generated in the 1^st quarter of 2008 alone by people clicking these ads – accounting for over 90% of Google’s revenue.

It’s simply the most effective form of marketing ever invented and when done correctly it allows small businesses to compete with larger national brands and regional chains on an even playing field and dominate them.

It’s fairly easy to setup a Google Adwords account, simply visit http://adwords.google.com/ to get started. Google will walk you thru a simple step-by-step process to create your first ad which can begin appearing live on Google within an hour.

But be warned, just because Google makes it easy to create an account, that doesn’t mean it’s simple to do it correctly. There’s lots of different settings available to you and if don’t know how to use these correctly or you simply let Google manage everything on your behalf, you may find that you’re wasting a lot of money and not getting the results you want.

It’s also a very time consuming process. Monitoring your account on a daily basis to make sure your ads are performing and your bid prices are optimized and your using the best ad creative can easily take a couple of hours a day. As a busy business owner you probably don’t have the time to do this all yourself effectively.  If you choose to delegate it to someone else though, there are some important things you need to know…

If you choose to use a search engine marketing firm to manage your search advertising, be aware that  most of these companies charge you a percentage of your advertising budget or they markup your per click costs. Therefore the more you spend or the more clicks you get, the more money they make so it’s not really setup in your best interest. 

You want to make sure you’re paying a flat monthly fee and/or a performance fee for qualified leads instead. This way the firm has no incentive to get you to spend more money than you need to and they won’t waste your money on keywords that generate clicks but don’t convert into leads because  they’re not targeted enough.

With that said, if you do still choose to do it yourself, here are some important tips you need to follow:

1.       Target your campaign to your geographical service area using broad keywords. This insures that your ad is only displayed to people who live close enough to do business with you and not everyone worldwide.

2.       Create 2 different ads. Part of your bid price is actually determined by how many people actually click your ads. Having 2 ads allows you to test different ad copy and determine which one is most effective. The results will likely surprise you.

3.       Create lots of different ad groups each with their own set of closely related keywords and ads.  The biggest mistake new advertisers make is they throw all their keywords into a single ad group. This is a recipe for disaster.  You’ll pay the highest possible bid prices this way.

4.       Learn how to use negative keywords effectively. For instance, if you sell replacement windows for homes, you want to use the negative keyword: “Microsoft”. This will prevent your ad from being shown to anyone who is actually looking for computer software instead of real windows.

5.       Set a high enough budget. This is another critical mistake most people getting started with Adwords make. You may feel like you just want to test the waters so you sit a really low daily budget of say $5 a day. This tells Google to only show you’re ad until you’ve spent $5 in a day and then stop running the ad until the next day. If you’re ad is not showing EVERY time someone searches for your keywords because your budget is too low then you’re back to the same old problem, they won’t know you exist. Once you get your campaign optimized and you know its generating leads, there’s really no reason to have any budget at all. If you’re getting $3 in revenue for every $1 you spend, why wouldn’t you invest as many dollars as you could?

As we mentioned earlier, Google owns over 60% of all search engine users which is why we focus on it the most. However, once you’ve maximized Google Adwords to the fullest extent you should definitely create search marketing campaigns on the other search engines as well.

Both Yahoo and MSN offer similar programs thru Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. Each has their own different tweaks but for the most part they work on the same principles. There are also lots of other smaller search engines that offer pay per click advertising programs but they’re typically not worth the additional effort unless you’re in a very competitive niche.

As with all your internet marketing efforts, testing is the key. Sometimes Yahoo can provide more qualified leads at a lower cost than Google. MSN AdCenter allows you to target your ads based on demographics as well as keywords so there’s some opportunity there as well. But in order to be able to test, you first need to have an accurate way of knowing what works and what doesn’t.

Technorati Tags: google adwords, local ppc, msn adcenter, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, yahoo search marketing

Many new Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg and many more allow users to add and categorize links to their favorite websites. This allows you to store your favorite sites on the Internet instead of just in your web browser so you can access them from anywhere. It also allows you to share your favorite sites with the entire world so others can benefit from the great sites you’ve found.

Most of these Web 2.0 sites allow you to “tag” a website page with various words that describe it. This eliminates the need to have a defined category structure like a typical website directory would have and allows you to categorize a website with whatever words make the most sense to you. (Hint: YOUR KEYWORDS!)

What makes social bookmarking sites so powerful is that the search engine spiders absolutely love them!

A search spider’s job is to scour the Internet in order to find and index all of the web page links it discovers. So it makes sense that these spiders will put a lot of emphasis on sites that contain lots of links about web pages that users feel are important. The more users that have the same site listed in their bookmarks, the higher the ranking the search engines will assign to it.

The tags are the real key though. Search engines determine what a particular URL is about based on the words that people use to link to it. This is why if you do a search on Google for the phrase “click here” the top 3 results are usually for Adobe Acrobat, Apple Quicktime, and Sun’s Java. Many sites distribute their content in one of these formats so they often have a sentence that says something like: “To open this file you will need to have Acrobat Reader installed. Click Here to download it.” The hundreds of thousands of links to Acrobat with the words “click here” give it a #1 ranking for that phrase even though those words don’t have anything to do with the product and they don’t appear anywhere on the web page.

So what this all means to you is:

1)      The quickest and easiest way to get your website pages to rank on page 1 of the search engines for specific terms is to bookmark them on ALL of the social bookmarking sites.

2)      Use the keywords you want to rank for as the tags for the bookmark. 

3)      The more sites you bookmark it on the better. Vary your keywords and descriptions slightly on the various sites so it appears natural.

4)      Don’t just bookmark your site. Add other related sites as well so it looks natural.

Social Bookmarking is a very tedious process though and takes a lot of time. As a business owner it’s probably not the best use of your time and it’s best to outsource it to someone who knows how to do it and doesn’t mind doing it for a lot less money than the value of your time. If you need help finding a reputable company to do this for you, just let us know and we’ll gladly help you out.

Technorati Tags: link building, search engine positioning, search engine ranking, social bookmarking, social marketing, web 2.0, website promotion

One of the major keys to dominating your competition is to have as many listings as possible on a search engine result page.

For example, if you do a search on Google for my main keyword phrase: nc internet marketing you’ll likely find that out of the 9.5 MILLION results found, at least 5 of the Top 20 results are either my main company website (Cybermedia Marketing) or other business profile pages about my business. The top 2 are for my main website, and 3 are on other local website directories.

Having this many results for your core keywords creates a position of authority that is very difficult for your competitors to match:

1)      It positions you as the expert in your market and the most logical choice. If you own 25%-50% of the top 20 listings for your given keywords while your competitors only have one listing (if any) you’re surely going to dominate.

2)      It forces your competitors to have to spend money on Google Adwords in order to show up on Page 1 of the search results at all. That is, if they’re even smart enough to know what Google Adwords is – which we’ll cover in Secret Tactic #5.
(Note: you’ll see my paid ad listed as well which I buy just to dominate the page even further, but I obviously don’t have to.)

3)      The more websites you have ranked on the search engines and the more links you have pointing to your main website, the more likely it is people will find you elsewhere on the Internet as well.
This is why the internet is called the World Wide Web and that’s exactly how you should look at it from a marketing standpoint. You want as big a WEB of sites as you can create capturing visitors and leading them to your main website. Just like the image on the cover of this book.

There are too many different business profile websites to list here but we’ll give you one of our favorites that almost always gets a Page 1 organic ranking if setup properly…

MerchantCircle.com – Merchant Circle is a great website to list your business on not only for the direct traffic the site gets but also for the love that Google seems to give it’s business profile pages.

You’ll notice that it’s my 4^th ranking in the image above and it even beats out the long established local business portal Citysearch.

MerchantCircle also has some great social networking features that allow you to meet other business owners in your area and nationwide. This creates a great opportunity to find and develop relationships with new potential business partners, vendors, and customers.

One word of caution though… a lot of these local business portals make their money be selling you ads, enhanced listings, or by offering to manage your search engine advertising for you on the major search engines.

We’ve typically found the enhanced listings to be of little value and the ads usually don’t get a whole lot of clicks. And you certainly don’t want them managing your paid search campaigns. Paid search is best left to experts who are paid based on their performance and know how to manage your campaign correctly in order to generate actual leads, not just clicks.

Technorati Tags: local search marketing, local seo, search engine optimiztion, small business marketing, small business seo, website promotion

The very first thing you need to do if you own a local offline business is to claim your Google Local Business listing.

If you haven’t already noticed, whenever you do a search on Google for a particular type of business AND a city name, you will often get what is known in the industry as the “Google Maps 10 Pack”.

What’s important to understand here is that these local business listings almost always appear at the top of the page, above the normal listings so they are more likely to get clicked. They are also much easier to get because they don’t rely on the same algorithm that’s used for the organic search results shown above, which are determined primarily by the number and quality of inbound links to your website.

In order to power these new map results, Google has licensed data from lots of 3^rd party business data providers such as yellow page companies and other aggregators like Acxiom and Localeze. So if you’ve advertised in the yellow pages or have a local business phone number thru the phone company, chances are you’re already in their database and may even be listed already.

However, sometimes this 3^rd party data is inaccurate and it’s almost certainly incomplete. Also, until you “claim” your business listing, Google doesn’t give it the importance it deserves because the data has not actually been verified by the business owner.

Luckily, claiming your Google local business listing is Free and easy to do:

1)      Visit the Google Local Business Center.

2)      If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password otherwise create a free Google account.

3)      Follow the instructions to create a listing.

Please remember these points when creating your Google Local Business Listing:

·         Make sure your information is consistent across the Internet. You want to use the same business name, address, and most importantly phone number throughout the Internet.

·         The street address you enter will be shown in the Google Maps search results. If you work from home or have a physical street address you don’t want to display, I suggest getting a mail box at a UPS Store (Note: You want a real street address not a PO Box from the post office)

·         Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in the search results in about 48-72 hours.

·         Be sure to add as much information about your business as you can and use as many of your keywords from Secret #1 in your business description, products, services and coupons as you can.

·         Upload your logo and other images about your business.

You can (and should) create similar local listings on Yahoo! Local and MSN (Windows Live Local)  as well.

Technorati Tags: google local, local business profiles, local search, local search marketing, local seo, msn local, small business marketing, yahoo local

Getting visitors to your website is useless if you can’t effectively convert them into prospects. Most people that are just starting out with online advertising make the mistake of sending everyone to their website’s homepage. This is a horrible thing to do for a lot of reasons…

First, your homepage is generally very broad. It typically gives users an overview of all the different things available on your site. If the page the user lands on after clicking a link for “Size 4 Blue Widgets” doesn’t take them to a page that specifically discusses that item, chances are they will leave instead of waste time hunting around your site to try to find it.

Second, your homepage typically does not contain a specific call to action. Users are often presented with lots of navigation options and other bright shiny elements which only create confusion and indecision about what to do next.

Now I’m not saying your website home page shouldn’t be generalized and offer navigation and highlight the main areas of your website. What I’m saying is that’s not the page you want to send people to when you are paying for that visit.

When you’re paying for traffic to your website, your #1 goal is to get them to buy whatever you’re selling.  But at the very least you want to capture that visitor’s information so you can build a relationship with them thru email as we’ll discuss in Secret Tactic #7.

These pages are commonly referred to as Landing Pages. Landing Pages typically have no navigation on them and often don’t even look like the main website. When the user lands on the page after clicking an ad they are presented with a specific offer or they can opt-in to the mailing list to receive more information.

So the key things you need to know about landing pages are:

1.       It should almost never be your main website homepage.

2.       Each ad group in your campaign should send the user to a page specifically about that product or service.

3.       The page should have the following basic elements:

a.       A strong, benefits rich headline

b.      A good story about your product or service.
Avoid “corporate speak” and talking about how great you are. Tell your story as if you were sitting next to someone at a bar and discuss what’s in it for them.

c.       Bulleted lists of the benefits (not features) someone will get by using your product or service. Use emotion and paint the picture of how their life will be different afterwards.

d.      Testimonials and Proof that your product or service works. Video and audio testimonials work best if you can get them but text is just fine as well. Try to include a picture and their full name and location for additional credibility.

e.      A compelling offer. By now you should’ve explained to them why your product or service is such an amazing value but spell it out for them once again in explicit detail. Then make them an offer they can’t refuse and back it up with a 100% guarantee.

f.        An explicit call to action. You have to ask for the sale. Tell them exactly what you want them to do next and exactly where they need to click.

4.       Don’t give the user any options on the page other than buying your product or service, calling you, or joining your mailing list.

5.       Keep branding to a minimum and towards the bottom of the page if you absolutely insist on using it. Many studies have shown that pages with no branding whatsoever perform significantly better than pages that are branded. This isn’t about your ego. You’re not likely to become the next Nike. Focus on acquiring customers instead. The branding will occur naturally on its own if you consistently deliver what you promise.

If you want a great tool for creating landing pages that is simple to use and has all the features you’ll need to generate incredible conversions, check out: http://www.landingpagetool.com

Technorati Tags: email marketing, landing pages, lead generation, opt-in forms

Unlike the Yellow Pages, the Internet is not simply organized by categories.  Most people find information on the internet by visiting a search engine and entering words into a search box. It’s your job to figure out which words or phrases people are most likely to type to find you.

There are basically 2 types of searches that people perform online: Discovery and Recovery.

In a discovery search, the user typically has a problem and is looking for all the available solutions. For instance, “leaking pipes”, “weight loss solution” or “best plasma TV”. 

With a recovery search, people are looking for information they already know exists. They may search for a specific brand, model number, or business name. 

It’s important that you identify both types of keywords so you can reach prospects during all stages of their buying cycle. Just be sure to spend more on phrases that indicate they’re ready to buy over ones that suggest they’re still doing research.

Google has a FREE tool that helps you to easily identify the words or phrases that people are searching for that relate to your business. It is located at: http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Simply enter as many phrases as you can think of that someone might type into a search box when searching for your business and the Google keyword tool will return a list of hundreds of related words and synonyms along with the actual number of searches that occur for each phrase.

Tips for using the Google Keyword tool effectively:

1.       Develop a list of the core products & services you offer. Include specific brand names and model numbers.

2.       Combine your core list with geographic terms such as city names, states you do business in, zip codes, area codes, neighborhood names etc.. You can also combine your core terms with action words like “Stop, Fix, Prevent, Solve, Buy, Purchase, Order etc…”

3.       Pay attention to the words or phrases that are returned but aren’t related to your business. You probably want to use those as negative keywords which we’ll discuss later in this guide.

4.       Identify the phrases with a good search volume (>1000 month) and low competition (<1 million sites) and build your website pages around these phrases.

5.       Use the top 10 terms from step 4 and then search google for each term. Enter the website url of the top 3 results into the keyword tool’s URL tab to uncover even more keywords you might have missed.

6.       Use the keyword phrases you identified in step 4 in the Title tag, meta description, H1 tags, link text and page url whenever possible.

Technorati Tags: adwords, google, internet marketing, keywords, market research, seo

Technorati Tags: local search engine marketing, nc internet marketing, small business marketing