Internet marketing starts with keywords research

One of the first steps when starting with an internet marketing campaign and search engine optimization (SEO) is keyword research. For SEO, this is the most crucial part of the planning phase. If you don't know which keywords your target audience is using to find your services and products online, how can you optimize your content?

Very few small business website focuses on doing a complete keyword research analysis before starting with their first SEO campaign. This is a costly mistake that you can avoid by planning and doing your research before you start with a campaign. If you want to get the best results for your internet marketing campaign, find below a couple of tips to help you get started with doing keyword research.

Keyword research

1. Before you start with any search engine optimization campaign, it is important to research all the keywords and long tail keywords you will be targeting with your initiative. This will help that you are only using the best keywords and long tail keywords for your campaign.
2. While you are doing keyword research, you will identify many missing opportunities. These are the keywords you didn't even think of before you started and they can be quite profitable for your market and niche.
3. Many keywords you initially used in your research will not be used in your campaign because these are the ones that will not be profitable. You will be able to identify these in your research plan.
4. Good keyword research and planning will help keep you focused on your internet marketing plan.

Doing keyword research is only one part of the search engine optimization process and you should never ignore the importance of this. In my experience, you have to put in as much into your keyword research plan as you are putting into your actual SEO initiative.

Once you have identified and researched the best keywords and long tail keywords that you are going to use in your SEO campaign, then you can carry out your campaign on a straight path with more confidence, focus, and force.

10 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

Have you ever wondered why some sites and blogs turn up at the top of a search result while others are buried 10, 20 or 100 pages down?Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO.It is because some sites are not search engine friendly. Organic Search Marketing is an effective strategy that results in competitive rankings for your site – leading to increased targeted traffic. Unlike Paid Search Marketing, Organic Search Marketing will help your site be ranked in the search results rather than the paid links section. Have a look at this article below that I came across on www.seomoz.org.

It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we’ve grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There’s an art to increasing a blog’s traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we’ve observed.

#1 – Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

When strategizing about who you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord, beautiful videos that tell a story and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).

#2 – Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers

Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don’t a Google search will take you much of the way).

Be a good web citizen and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you’ll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.

#3 – Make Your Blog’s Content SEO-Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I’ve written before, “SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing.” In 2011, Google received over 3 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing.

#4 – Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts & Find New Connections

Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Google+ has nearly 100 million. LinkedIn is over 130 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog.

#5 – Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results

At the very least, I’d recommend most bloggers install Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over.

Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you’re succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don’t ignore it, or you’ll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential.

#6 – Add Graphics, Photos and Illustrations (with link-back licensing)

If you’re someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like Flickr to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.

#7 – Conduct Keyword Research While Writing Your Posts

Not surprisingly, a big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It’s hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research, and luckily, there’s a free tool from Google to help called the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Type some words at the top, hit search and AdWords will show you phrases that match the intent and/or terms you’ve employed.

#8 – Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others

The web was not made for static, text-only content! Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines. When you reference your own material in-context and in a way that’s not manipulative (watch out for over-optimizing by linking to a category, post or page every time a phrase is used – this is almost certainly discounted by search engines and looks terrible to those who want to read your posts), you potentially draw visitors to your other content AND give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.

#9 – Participate in Social Sharing Communities Like Reddit + StumbleUpon

The major social networking sites aren’t alone in their power to send traffic to a blog. Social community sites like Reddit (which now receives more than 2 billion! with a “B”! views each month), StumbleUpon, Pinterest,Tumblr, Care2 (for nonprofits and causes), GoodReads (books), Ravelry (knitting), Newsvine (news/politics) and many, many more (Wikipedia maintains a decent, though not comprehensive list here).

Each of these sites have different rules, formats and ways of participating and sharing content. As with participation in blog or forum communities described above in tactic #2, you need to add value to these communities to see value back. Simply drive-by spamming or leaving your link won’t get you very far, and could even cause a backlash. Instead, learn the ropes, engage authentically and you’ll find that fans, links and traffic can develop.

#10 – Guest Blog (and Accept the Guest Posts of Others)

When you’re first starting out, it can be tough to convince other bloggers to allow you to post on their sites OR have an audience large enough to inspire others to want to contribute to your site. This is when friends and professional connections are critical. When you don’t have a compelling marketing message, leverage your relationships – find the folks who know you, like you and trust you and ask those who have blog to let you take a shot at authoring something, then ask them to return the favor.

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to spread your brand to new folks who’ve never seen your work before, and it can be useful in earning early links and references back to your site, which will drive direct traffic and help your search rankings (diverse, external links are a key part of how search engines rank sites and pages).

These are the first 10 tips, 11 more to come very soon. Leave a comment below about what you think.

8 Simple Tips for Marketing your Blog and Increasing Subscribers

Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing,web-marketing, online-marketing or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. Blog marketing is a method of using a blog as the medium to achieve this. If you want to reach and interact with potential prospects, blogging is definitively a powerful way your business can achieve this. I found this article below on windmillnetworking.com with tips for your Social Media Marketing strategy.

I recently blogged about why companies should blogand also why blogging is a great way to start your social media marketing efforts. Once you start blogging, you will soon want to increase the number of website visitors and RSS subscribers as well as get the word out about your blog. The problem, though, is that if your blog isn’t set up and maintained right, you could be promoting your blog to a transient audience. Whatever the purpose of your blog, you almost certainly want to reach as large an audience as possible, so here are 8 insanely simple tips for marketing your blog and increasing subscribers:

1. Start thinking in terms of key phrases

For each category of content that you want to blog about, start thinking of content ideas and associating them with keyword phrases. Use keyword tools (Google AdWords Keyword Tool is often recommended but I often simply use Google Suggest) to research niche key phrases and check out the competition. Avoid choosing the most popular keywords as these will already be covered by high-ranking bloggers, and you are unlikely to achieve high search engine rankings with these. Instead, choose a more specific, potentially long tail key phrase; include it in the blog post title and the body of the post. Better yet, optimize your blog for SEO with Scribe using this target key phrase.

2. Brand your blog

Customize the appearance of your blog with a logo and page template that separates you from other bloggers. If you use a common template, such as a WordPress theme, customize it with unique images and colors. Keep the colors and theme consistent throughout your blog and any other associated content that you produce. The aim is to create a unique brand that subscribers will eventually feel familiar with over time, which WordPress allows you to easily do. Don’t forget to also use interesting and relevant photos in a consistent way as eye candy on each blog post.  Better yet, include an educational video on each blog post, whether your own or created by someone else, as a way to add further value to your blog posts.

3. Don’t make your visitors think

Keep it clean and simple, and include a sitemap and friendly help pages to guide visitors around your blog. Most of the popular blog hosts have various types of plug-ins and options that allow you to create customized menus to file your content into categories; use these options to organize your posts and links to related content. Don’t forget to add a blog search bar!

4. Make it shareable

Set up buttons on your posts that visitors can use to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+ and other popular social networking sites, and add an ‘Email this’ or ‘Tell a friend’ option. Include RSS subscription options for your site, and submit your RSS feed to reputable directories. My recommendations on my Top 15 Social Media WordPress Plugins for 2011 post included DiggDigg for your social buttons and Feedblitz for RSS subscription management (and more!).

5. Build quality backlinks

Submit articles to article directories, write guest posts on other popular blogs, contribute to popular forums, and so on. These are all good ways to get quality backlinks and build your profile with online communities. Avoid using paid-for link building packages or similar schemes as search engines do not value low-quality links, and in many cases it can harm your rankings. Since you’re already involved in social media, simply sharing your blog posts with your followers is the easiest and most organic way to build quality backlinks.

6. Post regularly

The amount of posts you make will depend on the topic of your blog; if your blog aims to keep up with current news events, you should be posting several times a day, but a general interest blog may only be updated two or three times a week. The most important thing is to keep the timing of your posts consistent. Don’t make five posts in one day then nothing for several weeks. Once a week is the minimum you should aim for. From there, try two or three a week. If you don’t have enough content to last you for a month, don’t start blogging until you do.

7. Comment on other relevant blogs

Make sure that your comments are helpful to the blogger, or add something useful to the topic. Don’t spam or post links on other people’s blogs. If your comments are valuable, and give the impression that you know what you’re talking about, readers will click through to find out who you are without the need for underhand tactics.

8. Respond to comments

Allow readers to comment on your blog, and always respond to their comments. Remove any spam links placed in your comments section, but try to resist the urge to remove comments from those who simply disagree with you. Instead, respond in a friendly and courteous way; this can be difficult, especially if someone is being aggressive in their point of view, but it is also an opportunity to show your professionalism. My recommended comment management plugin for WordPress is Disqus.

If you follow the above blog marketing tips, you are well on your way to building a lasting community of visitors who will subscribe, comment and engage with you on many levels.

Any other insanely simple tips that I missed?

Quality content marketing to get results

Content marketing is all the buzz online, and many people see it as a new trend. Content marketing is not a new strategy in the internet marketing world, but it plays a vital part with any internet marketing campaign. Content marketing should not just be seen as placing random articles of text on your website and blog with the hopes of getting attention. If you can create quality content for your target audience that catches the attention of interested people, and they decide to share the content with their own community and network, you have succeeded in creating good content that will work for you.

The content you create doesn’t have to be plain “text” and the content can also be in the form of videos, images, or an infographic. Quality content is the content you create in your internet marketing and social media campaign to grab the attention of the people you are interested to reach. Creating quality content that will draw in interested readers is not an easy task, and it should always be created to support your traditional and digital marketing strategy.

How are you going to start with a content marketing strategy? Find below a couple of tips that can help you with content marketing.

Content marketing is not free

Content marketing is usually not free, and it is very important that you find the best sources for your content marketing strategy. Even though you can write the content yourself, it takes time and effort. I for one, like to write the content myself, but it does make it easier if you can find a good copywriter with experience in your industry to provide you with content. Content marketing shouldn’t be seen as a standalone campaign because it will support your SEO (search engine optimization), and social media marketing strategy. See it a a way to enhance and broaden your digital footprint. It is a way for people to interact with your brand, and that is why it is so important to focus on creating “quality content” that your audience will engage with. In simpler terms; take your content marketing strategy seriously.

Integrate content marketing with your other marketing strategies

To create quality content, provide valuable information that your customer needs, wants, and searches for. It is helpful to create buyer personas with a detailed editorial calendar that will help your quality marketing creation process. The content can then be used with your traditional marketing as well as your SEO, and social media marketing campaigns. Your quality content must have relevant call to actions and must be tracked/measured so that you can measure the results of your content marketing campaign. Ensure that your content will be easily find able, this means, it should be view able on a variety of devices. Not everyone uses desktop computers to connect with the internet, and many people uses smartphones, tablets, and even their TV.

Once you have started with your content marketing strategy, you must measure how well your campaign is doing with your goals. If you are not getting any positive results, reassess your strategy and adjust your strategy.

Social Media Marketing | Beginners Guide to Pinterest

So what is Pinterest? Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes and a whole lot of other interesting stuff. Now where exactly does this fit in with your social media marketing campaign? vikitech.com explains below.

Have you started pinning? If you haven’t, you are probably missing one of the hottest thing on the web at this time. In just two months, Pinterest has quickly grown from an ordinary start-up to the hottest upcoming social network.

Surprisingly, women are the dominant users of the social network. They create boards for recipes, family vacations, gift ideas, shoe galleries and share them with their friends and families.

If you haven’t set up your account, you can always browse the pins of other people. However, you need aPinterest account to join the train and start pinning. Already, we have covered How to Properly Set Up a Pinterest Account. Now, we shall quickly run through how the social network works and how people are using the network effectively.

How to Pin Your Interests

Essentially, Pinterest (P-’in’-terest) is a visual web-based bulletin board where users pin their interests and fantasies in pictures; and a pin is a photo or video with or without comments and a link to the originating website.

To have real fun pinning, you need to learn the basics of using Pinterest without hassle.

1. How to Pin Items on Pinterest

There are three obvious things you can immediately do with every item you see on Pinterest -  “Repin”,“Like” or “Comment”. By moving your mouse cursor around the top of a picture, you will find buttons for the three possibilities. If you find an item on Pinterest that you like and would love to keep, click on “repin”.

This will lead you to a page where you will select a board category for the item. Click on the arrow icon to get a dropdown list and select one of the boards you have created. Then enter a description and click ‘Pin It’.

Pinning items on Pinterest is as simple as that. To get other options like  tweet, like and email, do not click any of the three options at the top of the picture. Instead, click on the picture itself.

This will take you a page detailing other pins from the pinner of that item as well as options for liking, tweeting and emailing. Click on the corresponding button for whatever you intend to do.

2. How to Pin Items from Your Computer

To pin pictures and videos from your computer, locate the icon labeled “Add” at the top right hand corner of your Pinterest page and click on it.

It will take you to a page with three options – “Add a Pin”, “Upload a Pin”, and “Create a Board”. Select‘Upload a Pin’.

On the next page, click on browse and upload a picture from your computer. When the picture uploads, enter a befitting description and click on the red button labeled ‘Pin It’.

3. How to Pin Items from Webpages

The easiest way to achieve this is by using your Pinterest bookmarklet. You can learn how to get a Pinterest bookmarklet from the post on How to Properly Set Up a Pinterest Account.

Alternatively, you can follow the steps highlighted in ‘2’ above. Select the pin icon (in step 2) labeled ‘Add a Pin’ and enter the webpage URL to the column provided. Then click “Find Images’ to generate your image.

Stuffs You Can Do on Pinterest

1. Find Pins to Follow

One of the basic things you should be able to do on Pinterest is to locate boards that will interest you. To do this, go to your Pinterest homepage. At the middle of the top of the page, move your mouse cursor over the portion tagged ‘Everything’ to display a list of categories you can choose from.

Select the category that interest you to get a full page of recent pins under that category, and click on a picture.

The following page will display the name of the pinner of that picture amongst other information. Select the red button labeled ‘Follow’ to follow the pinner.

You can also follow these steps for other buttons at the middle of the top of your Pinterest page – ‘videos’, ‘popular’ and ‘gifts’.

2. Create Nice Pinboards

A pinboard is a collection of pins created by a person and identified under a topic. To create one, follow the steps under ‘How to Pin Items from Your Computer’; and select the icon labeled ‘Create a Board’. You will be taken to a page where you can enter your own topic, select a board category and create a board for pinning the items that interest you.

Check out the pinboards of other people or sites for ideas. You can follow step 1 under ‘How to Pin Items on Pinterest’ to get to their pages, or enter the link below after replacing ‘web URL’ with a real URL of a website.

http://pinterest.com/source/[Website URL]/
for example http://pinterest.com/source/cookrepublic.com/

Alternatively, you can search for pins and pinboards using relevant keywords to locate pinners to follow. You will find the search bar at the left hand corner of the top of your Pinterest page.

3. Get Pinterest Invite for Your Friends

If you want more fun on Pinterest, you need to invite your friends who haven’t tried the social network. The quickest way to invite your friends is by clicking on the red icon labeled ‘Invite Friends’ at the top right hand corner of your Pinterest page.

On the following page, you will find buttons for inviting friends from Facebook or through their email addresses. The instruction for inviting friends from Facebook is under How to Properly Set Up Your Account on Pinterest.

To invite friends via email addresses, input their addresses in the columns provided, add a personal note and send your invites.

So, How Are You Using Pinterest?

Pinterest is still hot and new; and different people are using the social network in different creative ways. Some people are using the network to drive traffic to their blogs and websites. Whereas, many others are using the network to plan birthday parties and weddings, explore new places, plan vacations, or stay in touch with influencers.

Tell the world the reason you are pinning and why you are on Pinterest.

Content marketing for small businesses

There are still many small businesses, internet marketingagencies, and online marketers that believe the best way to create valuable content is to do some keywords research and write a steady stream of articles in hopes that your organic search engine rankings will improve. Maybe they will at some point, but I usually don’t recommend this content strategy.

A far better way is to create the content that will be useful for the audience you would like to reach. It really doesn’t have to be hardcore keyword driven, or even focused on a specific niche, it just have to be relevant and useful. For example, let’s say you have a pharmacy. Instead of producing lame and boring content about your medical products, and how useful they are (if you are sick you need them anyway), why not produce valuable content that will be helpful for people?

Here are a some types of valuable content that a pharmacy could create that would be helpful:

• Common symptoms of various sickness symptoms
• Ways to stay healthy for the given month/season
• Why you should regularly visit your doctor

Be creative with your content

This list can really carry on forever. Your individual content items can be optimized around certain keywords that are associated with its content, but why not use “pharmacy” keywords and bore your network and audience to death? Think of something creative that your audience will find beneficial. After all, everyone needs a pharmacy from time to time so your audience is very broad.

By producing relevant and interesting content that goes way beyond keywords associated with pharmacies, you can increase your organic traffic based on the content that you publish.

A Solution for Correcting Erroneous Tweets

Twitter is a free micro blogging Web 2.0 service that enables its members to read and send messages known as Tweets. Tweets are short text posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s followers. You can send “Tweets” via the Twitter website, your mobile phone, instant messaging and a couple of other third-party applications. Twitter is one of the most used and top social media channels available to anyone but most members misunderstand the real power of this excellent Web 2.0 tool. Mashable explains further.

Twitter is celebrated for rapidly distributing breaking news, sometimes reaching vast audiences before that information is reported by the press. But sometimes that information is inaccurate, misspelled or taken offensively — and it can be difficult to correct once it’s saturated the Twittersphere.

So how do you stop a bad tweet from spreading? Simply deleting it often looks suspicious. Deleting it and issuing a correction is better, but even then, tweets can perpetuate in quoted retweets and in screenshots (or, if you’re a member of congress, remain forever on public display.)

In an entry on his agency’s blog, interface designer Oliver Recihenstein proposes an alternative. Give users the ability to mark their tweets with an “Error” status that would cross out the text, he suggests. That would clearly indicate that a tweet was sent in error and has since been corrected by the original sender. Users could then look through the sender’s timeline for a followup tweet.

  

I sent Recihenstein’s post around to my colleagues and a few journalists at other organizations, all of whom responded positively to the idea. Both Mashable reporter Alex Fitzpatrick and Anthony de Rosa, social media editor at Reuters, suggested it would be even better if redacted tweets could be automatically linked to a correction, although such a mechanism might be too complex.

Fitzpatrick was also quick to remind me that Twitter isn’t designed expressly for journalists — it’s been adapted by them. “I don’t think a lot of people realize how great for journalists Twitter almost is. If it was rebuilt with them in mind, it could be amazing,” he observed.

Twitter’s design team has thus far reacted less enthusiastically. Doug Bowman told Recihenstein he was worried about “the additional complexity that forking delete like this would bring.” He added, “It’s hard for Twitter to justify spending resources on features that would be used by a small relative base.”

  

What do you think? Would you like to see this feature, or a version of it, appear on Twitter? Or do you think, like Bowman, it would make Twitter’s featureset too complex?