Establish your business as the experts in your niche

As an internet marketing agency you want your business to be seen as the experts in your niche. In today’s digital business lifestyle, being the leader in your field is not won by only doing SEO and top organic rankings on the search engines. It’s about earning your credibility and become know as the expert in your field. It’s an exercise in marketing and branding fundamentals.

What is an expert exactly? You cannot call yourself an expert and hope that you will be known as one. It’s important that you can demonstrate judgement, skill, problem solving, and wisdom in a specific area. To become known as the expert in your field you need to demonstrate your expertise in a transparent way in your market niche.

Why you have to build credibility?

When you brand yourself and your business as an expert, clients will most likely seek you out because they trust you. New customers are much less focused on the prices involved and this means you can most likely up the price. When you are going through the ongoing process of branding your business as the experts in your field, it will also be much easier to attract top talent as employees into your company.

Smaller companies will at least start out with branding a single expert that the business revolves around. There is much more strength when there are multiple experts involved in your business to brand your business as the experts in your niche.

How to brand your business

Expert skills: How good are your skills compared to other businesses in your industry? What do you want to be recognized for? What makes your business unique and how are you providing value to your target audience?

Narrow your focus: Focus your expertise on a  specific area. Target a specific market niche and audience. Your expertise should always be align with the objectives you would like to reach.

Participation: Be visible and engage with your target market online. Be active online and speak at events. An easy way to do this is by presenting webinars online. You can also join various industry related associations and become known in your field as a visible leader. Establish your brand on the social web and be active with engaging with your audience.

Become a leader: Become a leader and not just a follower. You can create new ways of doing this by creating new online content such as blogs, videos, and images.

How the world spends its time online

You can have hundreds of websites on the internet, but if nobody knows about you, you are invisible. A well-planned, creative online marketing campaign can put you out there for the world to see and instantly increase your sales.

What is online marketing?

Unlike traditional marketing (newspapers, billboards etc.) online marketing combines all your digital strategies (websites, blogs, PPC ads, email, mobile etc.) in a way that grabs your customers’ attention and keeps them satisfied in the long run.

It is best handled by a professional who knows what he is doing. It requires careful research, planning and implementing.  The strategies used are just as unique as the client (or business) itself.

Why do you need online marketing?

The World Wide Web is an advertising battlefield – it is easy for your business to get lost amongst all the other websites vying for the attention of users. Having an online marketing strategy can mean the difference between your business booming or blowing up in your face.

If you answer “no” to any of the following, it is time to call in the experts:

• Does your business have a Facebook page/Twitter account and are people tweeting about you or talking about you online?
• Does your business have a blog and does it have a following?
• Can your customers find you easily online via your website or online advertising?
• Do you spend thousands on traditional marketing strategies without attracting more clients?
• Do you make use of SEO strategies in your online marketing?
• Do you follow up on customer satisfaction or keep in touch with your clients on a regular basis via email or mobile?

I can help you implement online marketing strategies that are measurable, goal driven and cost effective.

Expand your business, create awareness about your brand and engage your customers through social media – it works!

How internet marketing grows your business

The use of proper internet marketing grows your business with a wider reach than if you did not have an online presence.  If you consider the internet reaches the entire world, you potential are marketing to the world.  The first step in marketing on the internet is to have an online presence.  There are a couple of ways to go about this, one being an information website.  Another being a blog, however you can successfully combine the two for greater impact.

The first step in building a website is having a professional look.  Hire a web designer to make your website shine on behalf of your business.  Using your website is the first step in successful internet marketing.  Build the pages with quality content.  If you are not good with writing content, hire a professional writer.  You want the content to do two things, first to make sense to your visitors and second to make sense to the search engines that rank your pages.  Search engine ranking is one of the modes of marketing, by pulling in visitors who search for keywords and phrases related to your business.

Internet marketing requires your website be search engine optimized, meaning it is set up to help the search engines to crawl your pages and rank them on the search engines pages.  This is a way to draw free traffic from generic searches.  The goal is to use the meta tags on the website, with keywords you wish to be found for by your visitors.  These keywords need to be in the meta tags, the title, description, and keywords, and a few times within the content.  This helps the search engines to know how to rank you.

Another mode of internet marketing is social media.  Using social media websites like Facebook and Twitter helps to grow connections and network with others, which helps to grow your business.  If you connect the social media accounts to your website and if you interact at least once a day on the accounts, you will increase your list and raise the chances that others will also share about your business services and or products.  Place follow and share buttons on your pages to encourage your visitors to share with their connections.  This offers a way to advertise your business free and a way to make it go viral.

Lastly, internet marketing includes paid advertising.  There is a host of choices with paid advertising these days from your traditional print ads in newspapers and magazines to video commercials on television to ads on websites and with the social media groups.  There are also ads on search engines, pay per click, as well as on websites like Facebook.  The internet has many options for paid ads, from banners, to contextual, to full page features.

Consumer reviews VS other ad tactics

We all know how important “Word of Mouth” marketing is and with the power of the Internet it is even more important. Web visitors are more inclined to buy your products, services or solutions when they verify your credibility.The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature ofInternet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Enjoy today’s infographic about consumer reviews VS other ad tactics.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketingcan be immense for a business looking to expand its appeal to the online community. However, despite the numerous social media marketing advantages that exist, it is not ideal for all types of businesses. The reason for this is that whether social media marketing is useful for a business or not depends entirely on the correlation between investment and returns. Investment here is not only monetary but also effort and time. Similarly, returns can also be in forms other than money alone.

The best way for a business to evaluate if social media marketing is useful for it or not is to understand its significance and potential as much as is possible. In other words, before a business commits itself to a social media marketing campaign, it is important for it to assess not only the social media marketing advantages but also social media marketing disadvantages.

Social Media Marketing Advantages

There are more social media marketing advantages than disadvantages provided it is used properly. Consider the following:

1.  Social media marketing can be used to create brand value for a product manufacturer or a service provider. However, for this to happen, the content needs to be compelling and generate a lot of interest.

2.  One of the crucial social media marketing advantages is the fact that it allows a business to gradually establish itself as an expert in the field. Becoming an authority can generate sales in its own right because it means that people view the business as trustworthy.

3.  Social media marketing can be used to engage and interact with the target audience on a personal level so as to get their feedback about the business, product or service. This can create a sense of recognition and empowerment in the target audience.

4.  Economically speaking, social media marketing is one of the cheapest ways of not only engaging the target audience but also putting across relevant information. In fact, there is a drastic difference between the financial outlay of a decently sized conventional marketing strategy and a good social media marketing strategy with the latter being on the lower end.

5.  Moreover, the most direct of the many social media marketing advantages is the fact that it can generate leads and boost website traffic single-handedly. This can create a positive cycle where more visitors result in more sales and search rankings which, in turn, lead to more visitors again.

Social Media Marketing Disadvantages

While there are more social media marketing advantages than disadvantages, social media marketing is not entirely free of disadvantages. The following are some examples.

1.  Even though a social media marketing campaign can be done without any investment of money, a lot of time and effort is required to make it a success. For instance, resources would have to be set aside for not only making updates but also following and responding to them as and when required.

2.  Like most modes of marketing, the impact of social media marketing can be very difficult to assess quantitatively. The reason, as is obvious, is the fact that the objectives of such strategies tend to be intangible as opposed to statistical.

3.  It can be very easy for a campaign to go wrong if it is not handled in the right manner. The proper use is the right balance between engagement and sales.

Blog Design For Killer Search Engine Optimization

Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Here’s an infographic about designing your blog for SEO.

 

4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Here are a few tips from Mashable for writing SEO friendly blog posts.

In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines like Google. Your business can’t skip the task.

Since most would-be readers use search engines to find blog posts, you need to make sure that Google ranks your site highly when those readers search for terms related to your business and the content you’re writing.

You could spend thousands of dollars to have a search marketing firm optimize your business’s blog for search engines, but chances are that you can learn a lot of the fundamentals yourself, saving yourself a lot of money as long as you have the interest and the time. Here’s a basic primer on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your company’s blog.

1. Always Include Search Terms in Your Post’s Title

When Google reads a website to index it, it reads the code directly, not the snazzy presentation that humans see. The way most blogging platforms are built, the headline or title of your blog post is among the first things Google sees, and Google generally assumes the words that appear earliest are the most important. That’s why the title is the most important part of your blog post when it comes to SEO.

Think about who you want to reach with this blog post, and what that person might be searching for when looking for your business’s goods or services, then include critical words from that hypothetical search in the title. The most important terms should appear as quickly as you can reasonably fit them in. Just be careful not to make the title unreadable or awkward to human readers — that SEO effort will have been for naught if the reader is immediately turned off by the content once he or she finds it.

Here’s a pro tip: You’re not likely to win strong ranking for more than one or two search terms at once, so minimalism is a virtue here. Don’t get over-ambitious. Focus on one potential search term, then if you want to rank for a second term, write a separate and unique post specifically with it in mind.

2. Link Important Words to Earlier Blog Posts

Search engines generally assume that a blog post that has been linked to has more authority than one that has not. They also consider exactly what word or phrase linked to the post; a blog post about the iPhone is going to be more likely to show up in Google searches on the subject if another page links the word “iPhone” to the post.

You’ll get the most value from external links from sites that Google or other search engines already consider to be an authority of the subject (if the top blog about iPhones links the word to your post, you’ll get a huge boost), but all incoming links will still pass rank to your page, even those from elsewhere on your site.

So be sure and link important keywords to other pages or previous posts on your blog to gain some credibility and search rank. It will make a big difference. Just don’t overdo it; not only do human readers hate reading blogs so filled with links that they might accidentally click on something, Google may penalize you if you go overboard, too.

3. Hit the Tagging Sweet Spot

Most blogging platforms let you apply tags to your posts. Tags help organize your blog so both humans and search engines can find what they’re looking for. They’re terms like “consulting,” “local” or “technology” that reflect the topics and content of the post.

Google tries to recognize tags and use them to prioritize your site in its search ranking for those terms. The tags are usually links to other pages on your blog (usually a backlog of other posts with the same tag), and like we said earlier, linking search terms to other pages on your site helps too.

So by all means, add pertinent tags to your blog post, but be warned that Google and other search engines are wary of sites that try to game this system. They will penalize you in the search rankings if you use so many tags that the web indexing bots suspect you might be attempting to associate your content with unrelated topics just to score extra traffic.

The method for determining this is arcane, but a good rule of thumb from a pro blogger is that five to 10 appropriate tags are usually right in the sweet spot.

4. Use Google Insights to Find the Best Search Terms

You don’t have to play a guessing game about the best tags or search terms to link or put in your post’s title. Since Google is the most popular search engine, it makes sense to focus your efforts there. Whenever you’re not sure which terms to go with, hit up Google Insights, a web-based tool that compares the popularity of any search terms you want to know about.

For example, if your business is a coffee shop but you’re not sure whether would-be customers are more likely to search for “café” or “coffee shop,” Insights can tell you which one is more popular.

These four tips should get you on your way to having a more SEO-friendly corporate blog. Add your tips for search engine optimization in the comments below.

7 Editing Tips to Improve your Blog-Writing Skills

You can have hundreds of websites on the internet, but if nobody knows about you, you are invisible. A well-planned, creative online marketing campaign can put you out there for the world to see and instantly increase your sales. Now with that said, you will at one point need a blog in order to improve your online visibility. Take a look at these tips below fromsocialmediatoday.com.

Developing your blog-writing skills is a slow process. Work on your technique continuously and your work will attract readers. Take in readers critiques for they know best how well you are passing on your thoughts. Neglecting the editing aspect of blog-writing will deter your readers from your blog.  Here are the reasons why writers need to edit and how to edit your blog articles.

Let’s start at the basis of why writers need to edit.

• Inspirational chaos. Say you came across an amazing idea for a blog article that you know and feel will bring in traffic from the web. Then you start typing away with no end in sight. I like to call this ‘verbal/written diarrhea’ where your words just flow in every direction. Editing will help your thoughts come together in the end.
• Diverse ideas. Writers tend to get lost in their sentences or words and don’t take the time to double-check if their sentences would make sense to a reader. People may capture your writing differently than you had thought. In the creative process ideas get intertwined which can cause for messiness and a blog article that isn’t easy to read.
• Grammar and all that other stuff. Editing as you write never works out!  Take your time to edit your blog article after you have finished. We all miss one or two words when editing – sometimes we don’t even notice when we press the wrong key so spell-checking and revising each article afterwards is a must.
• Oh, you speak English, too? Even if you consider yourself an English-native speaker – edit your articles. Just because you were born into the English language and learned about it all your life doesn’t mean you won’t make any errors (it’s very naïve to think so).  

Follow these 8 simple tips to when editing your work that promise great writing skills for future blogs:

1. Take a breather after writing. The first mistake writers make is editing their post right when it’s done. Writer’s thoughts are fresh in their heads and when re-reading their article they might not pick up on the errors right away. Giving yourself time will put you in the reader’s seat without prejudice to your own work.  You won’t remember why you chose that exact word over another. This is the only time I recommend distractions: TV, music, Facebook, what have you. The key is to focus on unrelated things then come back to your article.

1. Divide and Conquer. Divide your editing into three processes: content editing, structure editing, and grammar editing. Being more specific while editing will help you focus on specific grammatical errors. Again, take your time.
   -Edit content. Review your article keeping an eye out for sections that don’t make sense. Look for unfinished paragraphs and fragments. After identifying them, work towards fixing the errors.
   -Edit structure. Write your articles in a way that the reader will be able to follow your content. Structure your content using bullets or bold headers.
   -Edit grammar. Lastly, edit grammatical errors. This shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes for a 800-900 word article.
2. Less is more. When it comes to words – less really is more. Don’t use complicated jargon unless your blog’s audience understands the lingo. Readers know when you have used the same words and are saying the same thing again. Remember the reader is smart – don’t underestimate their ability to understand your words. Adjectives and adverbs can confuse and distract readers. Keep overused words such as “definitely,” certainly,” “really,” etc. out of your article.
3. Don’t trust Spell-check. Trust your spell-check software lightly. These tools don’t “understand” your writing and don’t grasp variations of sentences or word usage.
4. Read at random. Choose a random paragraph from your article and edit it. Then choose anotherrandom paragraph and edit that one. Do so until you have finished editing them all. I know you’re asking yourself why? This tactic stops you from reading in “autopilot.” You wrote this article so you know what’s coming next and you may miss obvious mistakes.
5. Don’t overdo it. What’s harder than actually starting the editing process? Knowing when you’ve had enough. No sense beating a dead horse. If you find yourself rewriting the same sentence over and over then you should call it a night. Reaching the publishing stage is stressful, but don’t let your indecisive editing keep your article in the drafts folder.
6. Learn from your mistakes. After following the steps above, you will be closer to a perfectly written masterpiece. Learn from the mistakes you picked up in the editing stage. Analyze what you’ve done wrong and practice to get to your goal writing style. When you write your next article make a list of your mistakes along with your corrections. This will help you remember your mistakes and hopefully not repeat them.

I hope you find the above tips as useful as I have. There are free online tools such as After the Deadline to help with editing. This tool has helped me shift from writing in a passive tone to a more active tone. What actions to you take when editing a blog article?

How to start with a link building campaign

With internet marketing, internal links are worth gold for your website, but unfortunately internal link building is really not a guaranteed success. Building links does come with risks. One of the most common risks with link building is using excessive keyword based anchor links. If you are using a sidebar that is stuffed/spammed with internal links promoting all the pages of your website to help you increase your organic rankings rather than focusing on usability, then you are in for a tough ride.

So how can you start with a link building campaign that is safe? Find below a couple of tips to help you increase your organic SEO rankings that are quite easy to implement. As a general rule of thumb, don’t overdo it. Too much of a good thing is bad.

Link building

Blog posts: This is very easy where you can write a blog post and reference a previous blog post that you have published. Link to the blog post you are mentioning.

Link to similar pages: With your anchor text, link to similar pages on your website that covers related topics. If the topics covered are similar, point your readers to those pages. This can also help with the navigation of your website.

Use titles in your links: In the a href of your link, use title tags. These are great for non keyword links that serves for a user to take an action.

Limit navigation links: Never try to go overboard with your navigational links. Include a sidebar or a navmenu at the top of your website, but don’t use all the links in both.

Interlinking: You can add a link “find more” or something similar on the website pages that overlap each other. If you focus this on your visitors rather than the search engines, you most likely will get away with it.

When starting with internal linking your website always focus on your visitors. If you only focus on getting good rankings on Google, you will most likely do it wrong.