Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing Blog

I am a big believer in multi-channel marketing. I have always said market your products and services online and in print and if appropriate, radio, television, bill boards, etc., but now I believe there are so many ways to market yourself online that the phrase Multi-channel Internet Marketing is what we are going to be hearing more about in the future.

Nothing beats being number one on the first SERPs (search engine results pages) for the phrases your customers are searching for, but search engine optimization is supplemented and even improved by having a complimentary paid search engine marketing campaign and vice versa.

Email marketing is another way to keep prospects “on the hook” and customers coming back to your site. It’s a great supplement to other forms of internet marketing because it does what no other form of internet marketing can do. It allows you to not only target customers, but allows your customers and prospects to ask for your advertisements and opt-out if they are no longer interested. If your customers can get your advertisements in the form they want them, at a time when they are most likely to read them and only as often as they want them, they are more likely to look at your advertisements and remember them when they need your products or services.

The newest addition to our arsenal of internet marketing services is social media marketing.  Marketing on social media sites can allow you to reach millions of customers through sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Linkedin.  Posting your messages on these sites allows your follows to repost your content allowing you to get a lot more links to your website and blog, so social media marketing has search engine optimization benefits as well.

In marketing, one of the most important pieces of advice I can give is to always keep your company name and your brand in front of people’s faces.  All the methods of internet marketing can be used together to show that your company is well-established and experts in your field.

Social media marketing and blogging can take up most of an internet marketers time.  I’ve been doing some research lately to find tools to make social media networking and blogging more efficient, less time consuming and more fun.  I just wanted to tell you about Five Tools I’ve found that I think are awesome.

1.  WordPress for iPhone Application
I’ve seen some sad excuses for iPhone Apps when it comes to trying to find anything that will actually help you be productive away from your PC or laptop, but this tool looks like it’s going to be a winner.  It allows you to add multiple blogs, see as many of your recent posts as you want, edit local drafts and post right from your iPhone.  I’m so excited about finding this app.

2. Blog Carnival Submitter
I just found out about blog carnivals and then I found out about this tool that’s only $27 and lets you post your blog to as many blog carnivals as you can find for your industry.  This is a new product, but so far it looks promising.  Check it out:

http://www.blogcarnivalsubmitter.com

3. Setup your own facebook blog application with Blogfuse.com
This site is a tool for creating your own facebook application for your blog.  It’s an interesting way to potentially get your blog out in front of 60 million people.  Of course, you first have to get nine of your friends (you make ten) to install the application on their facebook, so you can submit it to the Facebook Application Directory.  You can also promote your application with an ad on facebook.

4. Ping.fm
I use this site to update all of my social networks at once.  I’ve actually signed up for more social networks because I handle them all through this easy to use website.

5. Firefox Shareaholic Add-on
This Firefox Add-on makes it really easy to share anything you find on the internet.  The best part is it takes up very little space in your existing address bar rather than adding yet another toolbar to the top of your browser window.  Download the shareaholic firefox add-on now.

What happens if you get traffic to your site, but visitors aren’t converting to buyers?

It may be time to consider whether your website has usability issues and do some testing.  Usability testing is something that can be done and should be done on all websites, especially if you find that a large percentage of customers are leaving your site at the same stage of the buying process.  It may be that they are all leaving from the homepage because they can not find what they are looking for or there may be leaving at a certain step in your shopping cart that is causing them concern or confusing them.

At the very least basic A/b testing should be done.  A/b or split testing is testing changes in one variable against the control or starting variable.  Multivariate testing or multi-variable testing is testing of more than one component of a website.  Multivariate testing is recommended over a/b testing for testing a live, fully-functional website, but both types of usability testing can be useful and help eliminate detrimental usability issues.

Google Analytics is a free website statistics program that comes with Google Optimizer.  Google Optimizer is an inexpensive way to tset your website.  If you need help with your usability testing, we will be happy to do it for you.

I see on craigslist all the time. Someone wants a website for their small business idea. They know that a website with a shopping cart is what they need, but once they have it and sales don’t start rolling it, they wonder why no one wants to visit their website or buy their product. What happened?

Well, it’s simple really. It’s not that no one wants to visit your website or buy your product it’s that no one knows it’s even online.

Most websites, especially popular website get more than 90% of their web traffic from search engines, but search engine don’t automatically put your website on the first page just because you’re online. You have to use a series of techniques called search engine optimization or SEO to show the search engines which keyword phrases your site should be listed under. You need to provide the search engines with unique content with those keyword phrases in it, so they know your site is relevant to those keyword phrases. Not just relevant, but more relevant than all of your competitors because if you want web searchers to client on your site, you need to be on the search engine’s first page for your keyword phrases.

While you’re working on getting the search engines to list you on their first page, which can take months, you can almost immediately bring targeted traffic and customers to your website by bidding for keywords through search engine marketing (SEM) or pay per click (PPC). In programs like Google Adwords, you can bid on keywords and only pay when someone clicks on your site. You can also advertise through social media marketing on sites like facebook.com.

Email marketing is another way you can bring visitors to your site. Building or buying an email list and email those customers that opt-in to your mailing list is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of bringing traffic to your site.

Online marketing is an essential part of success on the internet. No matter how great your product or how beautiful you believe your website design, it’s not enough to just put your website out there and hope for the best.

Well, they are both huge right now.  I don’t know which is growing at a faster pace.  I, for one, certainly jumped on the facebook bandwagon first.  It was an easy jump from myspace, but myspace is long gone in my book.  I’m still out there.  I think most of the 50 or so friends I had on myspace might still have myspace pages too, but I don’t login or even look at myspace unless someone sends me a message.  Most of the working adults I know never bothered with myspace, but facebook is a different story.  Just about everyone I ever worked with is suddenly on facebook.  I’ve found friends from college, high school and even junior high.

Well, then, along comes twitter.  I think I initially signed up for twitter because I saw an ad on facebook.  I signed up and then my account sat there for months.  I just didn’t get it.  I had no idea what to do with it.  Then, I started hearing about twitter on the radio.  Hmmm, I thought.  I have a twitter account.  Maybe I should take another look at it, but I didn’t.  Not for a few more months.  Then I started hearing about it from friends.  Then, I found a twitter feed and checked it out.  It was slow process for me, but I finally figured it out.

Twitter is a great way to get your message out there as often as you like in 140 characters or less.  Twitter is finally taking it’s place in social media marketing and in a big way.  I’ve found that by simply finding and following people in your industry, people start following you, people you don’t even know.

I feel like twitter is really just starting to take off and many people haven’t figured out what it can do for them yet, but once they do it’s going to be as big if not bigger than facebook, especially for businesses.  I also found another great website called twibs.com.  It’s only purpose is to provide a directory of businesses on twitter.  I think websites and programs that use twitter as there main vehicle of getting their message out there are going to be popping up like mad in 2009.  I can’t wait to see what will come out next.

A client recently brought up the idea of putting their website on myspace.com.  My response was to wonder if businesses are on myspace.com.  Isn’t business facebook.com domain?  Clearly not all social media marketing sites are directed towards businesses.  Many are directed towards people making friends and staying in contact with friends, so I decided to do some research on myspace.com to see if I found any businesses advertising.  I first looked for online book stores with myspace.com and found one that looked like a legitimate business.  Then, I searched for web developers and found a few, but only a tiny fraction of the web development businesses you would find on facebook.com.

My client pointed out to me that myspace.com is for bands.  She sells music, so myspace.com may very well be a great place for her to do a little social media marketing.  For most businesses, I would certainly recommend setting up pages on facebook.com and linkedin.com.  Join twitter.com and start following people in your industry.  Tweet everyday about your products, services and your industry.  Not only is twitter a great opportunity for people to find you, but you may actually learn a lot from twitter too.

Here is a list of social media marketing websites:

http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/04/02/looking-for-a-list-of-social-media-sites-i-have-them-all-here/