Get your plan together...

Most people out there who are planning on starting a new business online or adding to an existing business have their plan in their head. This is especially true for those of us who are already online. This is a sure-fire recipe for disaster, and what this post is going to do is look at a few things you must take care of before you start firing away with your online business. Basically, if you rush into a web business without taking care of this stuff, the cracks will show soon enough...

1. When you realize that you are going to use the Internet for marketing, make sure you have an objective. By this I mean you have to sit down and think carefully about what you are trying to achieve with this venture. Are you planning to use the Internet to find new clients? Or are you using it to offer information and services that they might not find elsewhere? Do you want to create an online community for your existing clients? How much money do you want to spend? Work out all of this and you are on your way to being sensible and focused when it comes to Internet marketing.
2. You could utilize what many of the most successful online companies do these days and have a marketing funnel. To best understand this concept, think of an upside down triangle. Clients start at the top of the funnel, where they can expect base-line or low cost products and services offered by your company. Then as they progress down the funnel, add-ons and other products that add value to the customer experience are offered. Does your company do this? Look at your product line or portfolio and work out how to keep customers travelling down deeper into the funnel...
3. Get on Google and do a keyword search for the products and services that you offer. Then write down the URLs of the op five competitors that offer the same stuff you do. Then find the gaps in their service and exploit, exploit, exploit...
4. Whatever you do, don't do shotgun marketing. This is where a company just tries to sell to everybody and their cat. Target your market, find out what they are like as people. Are they male or female? Where do they socialize (both on and offline?). What do they read? Find out and focus all of your efforts on them. They make your company what it is, so respect them.
5. As outlined in earlier posts, know what problems your consumers have and solve them. Don't just offer a product that will help. Actively solve their problem by making it very clear to them that you know what their needs are.

We will look at more ideas on your plan for Internet marketing next post.

The Apple Picking Story Unpicked

Did you work out what it was all about? In the previous post we looked at the story of five apple pickers and their fortunes. The entire story is a great metaphor for the SEO process. How? The apple pickers are website owners. The apple trees are keywords and the apples are website visitors. Remember the first guy in the story? He just sat there under the tree and waited. No prizes for guessing what kind of website owner he is supposed to be. That's right, the lazy one. He just sits there and waits for visitors. We know that doesn't work in the world of online commerce. The second apple picker only chose to pick apples from the trees that looked healthy. This is the website owner who optimizes a page with words that they think are going to grab visitors. But they haven't really done their homework, and their keywords don't do much business because they aren't the phrases that people are really using to search. The third apple picker who checked out all the trees and chose the one with the most fruit he could reach is like the owner who builds a site, does excellent research, and optimizes the site for good, relevant keywords that his site is well placed for. They are not the most popular words in his area of expertise but with good optimization of the on-page variety he is able to get his site somewhere near the top 10 search results and generate sales or leads. The fourth apple picker who looked at all the trees, chose the one with the most fruit she could reach, and then built a ladder to get at them is like the site owner who works hard at keyword research, makes a real effort at optimizing his site, and begins building strong links to his site. He not only receives better results at an early stage, but his traffic and sales increase sharply as the number of links grows and he is then able to work on more competitive keywords (or for the purposes of our story, bigger trees). Finally, the fifth apple picker who looked at all the trees that were there in the valley, then built a ladder, and then took the notes about the number of apples from each tree is like the website owner who does keyword research, content optimization, strong link building, and tracks his rankings with ranking reports and then his site traffic with good analytics. He is able to build a website that competes for the best phrases and can reflect and adapt as his field and search marketing trends change.

Laying the Groundwork for Email Marketing

In a recent post we looked at how you should identify the top 20% of your customer base, and then treat them like VIP customers in your email marketing strategy. So how do you approach the development of this strategy? Think Creative It's time to get creative. Think about how you've served the needs of this top 20%. Think about how you have been creative in solving their problems. Then write up a case study of each successful project. Pick something you can be proud of, and detail it as a success story. If you can, ask for testimonials from happy clients. Keep a Record Keep a log or diary of successful techniques you have used, articles you have read that have improved your delivery, and any client questions or problems you find yourself answering repeatedly. Meet The Press Begin to court the press. Journalists often frequent chat rooms and forums. Get in there and start talking about your company and answering questions. Get out to the local press and present your firm as a solver of business problems. If you have contacts or colleagues in the know, ask for details about anyone they know in trade publications, and start to play the game. Write letters to magazines, attend shows and events. Get used to representing your firm in the media. Be a Winner If there are any competitions in your field that you can enter because you have the ability, do it. Even if the world at large might not think a win for "best T-shirt design" is Earth-shattering news, let people know about it. Everything that keeps your name in people's minds is helpful. Winners do business. As you develop these items over time, you are assembling a library of resources that you will be able to draw on in your email marketing efforts -- questions you can answer and stories you can tell that will connect with your audience. Keep a record of what you have developed, ready for use when you need it. This is basic groundwork to make sure that your email messages contain something of value. Next we'll look at delivering on the strategy.

Top Five E-mail Marketing Mistakes

Before we continue to explore the benefits of a good e-campaign, we need to look at some cardinal rules, or rather the breaking of those rules. When companies decide that they are going to use email to market their products and services many of them make the classic mistake of thinking it will be a cinch. Without careful thought as to what will actually go in the emails, you will be sending the electronic equivalent of those shiny junk envelopes that customers toss in the garbage. The top five mistakes companies make when using email to market are...

1. Poor content. You read magazines, right? The average glossy magazine now has about a third of its weight taken up by advertising. But we tolerate that. Why? Well, because the other stuff is both interesting and readable. Great content and advertising work well together. So, take a look at your firm's emails, and get harsh. Is the content likely to keep the customer reading? Is it brief but well-written? Does it offer an insight into your product or offer a solution to their problems? Take the time to look at what your marketing guys have done with the emails and make sure that they're worth reading. Otherwise, scrap them and start again.
2. Bad SPG. Spelling and grammar must be perfect. This cannot be over-exaggerated. Put yourself in your customer's shoes (you know, the guys who pay for your groceries). If someone sent you an email that looked like it was written by an eight year old, would you respect them?
3. Multi-media swamping. Don't overload your emails with graphics. These take time to load on customer's computers, and they're often filtered anyway. They also distract from your message. Don't waste your customer's time, or they won't give you theirs.
4. Be allowed. This is really simple. Make sure that your recipients have agreed for you to send them email. If they haven't, it will be tagged as spam. Once your customers consider your message as spam, it is spam. Period.
5. Try, try again. Too many businesses do too many things without thinking first, and emailing is one of them. Test out your email marketing on a small group of customers first. Don't screen them; make it as blind as possible. Choose twenty customers, and test with them. You'll know who opened what and who responded. This is a great way to test the quality of your strategy.

This raises the point of having a strategy. We'll be covering what an e-campaign actually looks like soon. But just remember one thing: what's bad for your customer is bad for your business.

Marketing For Real in a Virtual World

For many people, starting a business is an exciting experience. As a business matures, however, it is all too easy to lose sight of your goals and instead get caught up in the daily operation of the company. A key aspect of your business life that can fall by the wayside is marketing. Marketing is the lifeblood of your firm. It is the gasoline that keeps you running. If you don't understand this point, ask yourself why the biggest companies in the world still spend millions on it. In this post we are going to look at an aspect of marketing that is often overlooked by small and medium sized businesses. This oversight is unforgivable, especially now in the e-commerce age, where marketing potential is limitless. Believe in your firm, communicate the mindset. Let's say you are a dry-cleaning company. You take customer's garments and you clean them. On your website you say this is what you do. And you're the best in town. Okay, so far this is simple, basic marketing. Just singing your own praises. It's selling yourself, but it isn't marketing effectively. To make your firm different from the next drycleaner down the street get your mindset onto your website. This is the ethos that you and your management team carry around with you all day. The way to do this is to think back to why you started the business. Yes, it is true that there was a gap in the market, that is why you are still in business. But that isn't really why you started the business, and gaps narrow anyway. You have to think about the solution you are offering to customer's problems, decide what your service does that helps people. Simply put, to make your marketing message more effective you have to be a problem solver. So while you are a dry-cleaning business, you are also... A firm that helps people who enjoy fine clothes by cleaning them to a high standard, making your clothes look good for longer. Your customer wears fine clothing and they want the garments to last. You can solve this problem. Incorporate this idea into your marketing message and you are marketing your mindset effectively. Customers will come to you for solutions. You have to make your company seem different to the rest of the guys in town. If you don't do this then your sales will suffer. And it doesn't matter how snazzy your offices are or how flashy and colourful your website is, if you don't have a clear marketing message that communicates your mindset and makes you seem innovative and dynamic, you won't last for long. Look at your mindset, formulate it, and convey it in words. Then use your best marketing tool (your website) to get this mindset across in as many ways as possible. Then you are beginning to use the Web effectively to build business.

Developing an e-campaign

Email has not died yet. It is still an effective form of communication, even in the age of Facebook and instant messaging. What many businesses don't realize, however, is that email is a marketing tool that can be used to generate business. And I'm not talking about spam, which is rightly vilified, and will eventually be wiped out or at least severely limited. What I am talking about is using email to target your customers in an intelligent, research-led way. Many businesses still think that email is just a quicker version of snail mail. They are missing out on a highly effective addition to their e marketing arsenal. Before you can use email as a proper, effective marketing tool, as part of an e-campaign rather than just a shotgun approach, you need to consider a basic concept in marketing... The cream of the crop First of all, don't even bother to use email as a marketing tool until you have identified the top 20 percent of your customer base. These are your best customers. The old 80/20 principle, whereby twenty percent of your customers provide you with eighty percent of your profits, means that you should identify your top 20%, and focus your email campaign on them alone. So identify these people. And then:

• Consider how they became your customers. Was it via referrals, through a trade show, or through networking?
• Decide just what it is that makes those customers profitable. Why are they your top 20% and what lessons can you learn to help you attract more like them?
• What do you need to tell those customers, or what do they need to know to buy your services? What information do they require?
• What is the best way to reach those customers?

When you know who your top 20% are, make a solemn promise to yourself and your business that you are going to treat them like VIPs, and that your e-campaign will recognize them as the bedrock for future growth. Future articles will focus on what action you must take to cultivate your 20% list effectively, and develop an e-campaign that will drive sales and build your firm's reputation.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

For anything and everything, the Internet users today go to search engines, and type in what they want to find out. They get the result pages (SERPs), and click and visit some of the first results. This is what is happening everywhere; millions and millions of users access Google every day for information. When a website offering a particular service gets a hit (traffic), it has a chance to make a sale. So, all of the companies out there try extra hard to make their websites hit the top of the search engine result pages. The simple set of procedures for this purpose is known as Search Engine Optimization, the art of getting a website to rank high on search engine search result pages. Search Engine Optimization is done through various steps, and if not done properly, it can backfire. Basic Steps of Search Engine Optimization For a site to be well optimized for search engine traffic, its content should be understandable to the search bots (the program used by search engines to index a particular site; also called web crawlers, search spiders, etc.) The content in the site has to be generally useful to the reader as well as understandable to search engines; keywords and descriptions in metadata help you achieve this. An important step of Search Engine Optimization is creating Meta tags for each page, with keywords and descriptions. Also the title tag should have your most important keyword. Search Engine Optimization requires keyword-rich content. People search for keywords on the search engines. And the search engine bots look for these keywords on the indexed pages. So, keyword-dense content easily scales up the search results. However, overuse of the keyword will blacklist the site as spam. Search Engine Optimization, hence, requires an expert to prepare good quality search engine-optimized content. Also, highlighting the main keywords with such formatting as bold, italics, underline, etc., is very advantageous. A minimum keyword density of about 2-4% is effective. And the content is best optimized targeting only one keyword or two at the most. Another important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is the number of incoming links to the page. The incoming links convince the search engines that the page is important enough to be displayed as a result. The incoming links, however, have to be from reliable sources (there are unreliable sources like link farms, which are websites solely made for linking to other sites). So, it is very important for Search Engine Optimization to create some links to whichever page you try to optimize. These methods just introduce you to what you should do to achieve good Search Engine Optimization for your sites. There are, however, so many other important aspects in Search Engine Optimization. Google itself is known to count hundreds of different metrics to calculate the PageRank of a site (Google's measure of the importance of a site). Conclusion The potential business a firm can acquire on reaching the top of search engine results is amazing. Search Engine Optimization, as I said earlier, is an art by itself. It should be done methodically and painstakingly. If done properly, you will enjoy great profits from it; on the other hand, malpractices can get you undermined very easily. Hence, it is important for you to hire a reputed, reliable professional for the purpose.

When was the last time Google visited you?

You probably visit Google several times a day, but do you know how often Google visits you? There are ways to find out. Google offers a free tool that will not only tell you when it last "crawled" your website, but what pages it looked at and any errors that were found along the way. Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to find out what your site looks like to a search engine. They can help identify problems, learn what search phrases are being used to find your site and which ones actually result in clicks from the results page. This valuable information can help you adjust the wording of text on your site and fix errors that could prevent search engines from indexing your content and giving your site a better ranking. Webmaster Tools can also show what sites are linking to and from your own. Google considers the value of a site that links to yours when it's determining the value of your content, so it is important to monitor those and try to collect links from valuable sites. These considerations are some of the basic elements of search engine optimization. Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is Sitemap creation and submission. Not to be confused with the "site maps" you view in a Web browser, Google Sitemaps are special XML files that describe your site to search engines. Essentially, they allow you to give advice to Google about how your content should be treated. You can say how often a particular page changes (daily, weekly, monthly) and describe the relative importance of different pages. For example, you might prefer that someone searching for the name of your CEO should land on his official biography in your "About Us" section rather than a press release from three years ago, even if the press release mentions his name more often. Google Sitemaps allow you to give such instructions. They also allow you to specifically list pages on your site that might be hard for Gooogle to find by looking at links. Webmaster Tools also allow you to verify the structure of your robots.txt file, which is another specially-formatted file giving instructions to search engines. This file has the opposite purpose of a Sitemap -- it exists to tell the spider what parts of your site should not be indexed. Google Webmaster Tools can make sure your robots.txt file properly follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol. See the quick start guide that Google provides for more in-depth coverage of the available tools. If you find that your site needs some changes to be more accessible to search engines, drop us a line at support (at) cws (dot) net.

How to Get Your Site to the Top

The Internet, once only the home of computer nerds and hackers, has long since exploded into mainstream business. A new profession has sprung up in response - Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a service industry based on getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings and keeping it there. The truth is that SEO boils down to three simple steps: 1. Build a great site 2. Incorporate keywords 3. Get other great sites to link to yours That's the recipe that will continue to work no matter how often Google reprograms its search algorithms. Following these steps won't catapult you instantly to #1 in the rankings; it's more of a "slow and steady" strategy. But it's a lot better in the long run than resorting to shady SEO tactics that will put your site at the top of the results page... only until Google bans your site! Building a great link structure has been a part of SEO for some time. However, thanks to Google's changing search algorithms, the ideal type of link structure has also changed. Here are some tricks that will help you build useful links. Note: Throughout this article, Google is cited as the target for SEO. There are two reasons why it's best to focus on Google. First, it's the most frequently used search engine, so optimizing for Google will tend to bring in the most traffic. Second, Google has the most stringent requirements and elaborately programmed algorithms, so if you're doing well in Google- you're likely doing well in the other search engines. Not all links are created equal One strategy you should not rely on is soliciting links right and left. Links from important and reputable pages build your own site's reputation; links from less important sites help a little, but not as much; and links from certain shady sites are no good at all. An example of the last is the link farm, a site that's designed solely for the purpose of providing links to other sites in exchange for money. Google hates link farms with a passion and refers to them as "bad neighborhood" sites. Associate your site with several "bad neighborhood" sites and Google might decide your site is in that neighborhood, too. On the other end of the link quality scale are the major informational sites and directories. Links from directories like DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and Yahoo! can provide an impressive boost to your ranking. So can links from extremely reputable sites like CNN.com. The quick rule of thumb when deciding if a site would be a good source of an inbound link is to look up that site's Google PageRank. You can get this information simply by installing the Google toolbar on your browser. Once the toolbar is installed, click on the Options button and select "PageRank display." Then you can browse to sites and their PageRank will display in the toolbar. As a rule of thumb, don't bother soliciting links from sites with a PageRank of less than 4 (PageRank works on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest possible rank). Get those links So how do you get important sites to link to you? Start with having useful and relevant information on your site. If you have a page that's relevant to another site, just bringing this page to their attention can get them to link to you. After all, these sites want to be useful resources for their visitors and providing those visitors with great sources of information will keep them coming back. Once you've identified an important site and have produced information that's useful to them, search that site for the webmaster's contact information. Call or email that person and suggest that they take a look at your site and, if interested, provide a link to it. This strategy isn't likely to get you a link from MSNBC.com, but it can work very well with smaller sites. Don't limit your searches to .com and .net sites, either - Google tends to look with particular favor upon .edu and .gov websites, so getting links from these sites can give your ranking even more of a boost. Another way to build links fast is to set up reciprocal links - in other words, contact a webmaster and tell them that if they link to you, you'll link back to them. Having a few reciprocal links is fine but if you have too high a percentage Google will get suspicious. To be on the safe side, try to have at least 3 one-way links for every reciprocal link you build. This will create what Google calls a natural link structure. Patience is a virtue The techniques described above are not a magic bullet. Don't expect your site to immediately shoot up the results page. But if you take the time to build a solid, "natural" link structure, you will be able to get your site highly ranked, and you'll be able to keep it that way.

Are You Listed in Google Local?

Have you searched for a local business in Google and discovered a map with the business locations on the page? Is your business on that map? With Google Local Business Center, you can put your business on the map and not pay a dime. Google Local is a feature to help find local businesses, even when they have a web site. These listings show companies who have entered business information in the Google Local Business Center, advertised with companies like CitySearch, SuperPages, DigitalCity, or other local portals, or simply have a Yellow Pages listing. Even when you have the top search result listing for a specific phrase, the Google local listings may still show up first, so it pays to be included there as well. Major Factors What are the major factors for being listed first in the local results? Currently your business location, local internet advertising and a listing in the Yellow Pages are the top three. Having a well-optimized site also helps with these results. Location The distance from a business to what the Yellow Pages considers the "center" of your city can play a big part. Try a search for Minneapolis pizza. The majority of local results are located in the Minneapolis city limits. Physical location plays a big part in many different Google Local searches and it makes sense that they will continue to consider this a valuable factor. Getting Listed Adding yourself to Google Local can be done for free by signing up at the Google Local Business Center. You can write your own description, list your business hours, the kinds of payments you accept, and you can choose to show contact information including an email and link to your website. Getting your business into Google Local Business Center can help with your online advertising. It is still most helpful to have a well optimized site for search engines. Updating and maintaining your site so customers continue to use your business is also a big asset. A listing in Google Local is just one more great way to reach out to new customers looking for your business online.

From Garage Business to Household Name in 5 Years

You probably use it every day, but did you know Google is now a word in the dictionary? How can a search engine be so popular that it influences how nearly all businesses market themselves on the Internet? Google's secret was the development of a unique algorithm to not just index the contents of a page, but to help ensure that you get the most relevant results for a particular search. From this starting point, Google has evolved to become a household name and sets the standard for all search engines. Google was started by Larry Sage and Sergey Brin in 1996. Initially named "Back rub," their search engine started to gain popularity on the Stanford University campus. In 1998, the founder of Sun Microsystems gave the two a check for $100,000 after a quick demo. Sage and Brin leased office space in a friend's garage and started Google.com. 1999 brought dramatic change and growth to Google as the company moved twice and got bigger. By 2000, 18 million user queries every day were being answered by Google. By 2002, Google had expanded to advertising, search appliances, Google News and Froogle. In 2004, Google had indexed 6 billion items (plus 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages). Google has continued to grow and expand its technology, now offering PDFs of public domain books for download, for example. Google has made vast amounts of data accessible to the public, such as: years of historical film footage, U.S. Patents, Maps (Earth, Moon and Mars), pictures, video, music, and of course their staple: websites. Google ranks in the top 3 sites for internet traffic, so most internet marketers give serious thought to how Google will see their site. Google is a big part of the Internet. The public uses it to search, and companies use Google to advertise, or to analyse the competition. Optimizing a site for Google to help your company show up higher in search results can have a big impact on your bottom line, and the effect can carry over to other search engines as well. This has become a fact of life in the web development industry and will continue to be so in the future.

Search Engine Optimization - SEO

Have you ever wondered how, when you search for something on Google or Yahoo!, that some websites are listed above others? Search engines list the results by examing their databases of website content to find the sites they consider most relevant to the search term. There are ways to help a website move up the list for a particular term, and that is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. Websites can use many different methods to get a search engine to notice them and list them higher. As more site administrators are becoming aware of this, of course, it is getting harder for a site to move up. It takes research and effort to get results. Corporate Web Services (CWS) has a new program that allows our team to do this kind of research more quickly and make improvements. When using search engines, many people never go past the second page of results. With this new program, CWS can review a current website, advise and make changes to help a site stay high on the list and reach those crucial first two pages of results. A second factor that influences the ranking of search engines results is the way that other websites links to yours. By analyzing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about (by comparing its content to the context of the original page) and how "important" the page is (if many other popular pages link to it) -- and thus deserving of a boost in ranking. SEO can help get your website noticed -- by ensuring the site is relevant to your subject, includes key phrases, and is connected to related sites. There many other factors that can help your site's ranking; these are only a few. Contact us today for a detailed consultation.

Welcome... Jon Bernhardt

CWS welcomes the newest member to our team, Jon Bernhardt. He comes to CWS from Charter Business where he was a Customer Support Specialist. Most recently, he returned from Iraq where he was deployed with an Army Reserve unit. The company transported fuel across the country. Jon worked as supply for those troops, providing soldiers with clothing, tools, and food. Thankfully, no one in the company was hurt. Jon lives in Rochester with his wife and two cats. He enjoys watching the Minnesota Twins play, and follows Big Ten football closely. Jon and his wife recently went to Washington DC for vacation. There they saw many of the sites and museums. On the return trip, the two ran into the "O'Hare monster" in Chicago. After staying in the airport for 14 hours, their plane finally left for Rochester. Jon's role within the company will be to provide fanatical support and outstanding customer service to our existing customers. In addition, he will be expanding our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. CWS has a new system that allows our team to research quicker and find better ways to move sites up the search engine list. With this new system, CWS can look at a current web site, advise and make changes to move the site up to the first results page. Jon is currently training to receive his CIM Certification. Jon can be contacted (507) 289-2229 x208.

Lesson 6: Pay Per Click

Congratulations, you've made it! This is the final lesson of our website marketing series. By this point, you're learned to analyze your website statistics, modify your pages to include keywords, increase your inbound links, and improve your search engine rankings. But what can you do if this process is going too slow and you want immediate results? You may want to consider starting a pay-per-click campaign. Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign. Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a "per-click" basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines. As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee. Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you're up and running. It doesn't demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier - and more effective - the process will be. The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position - which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword. In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors. The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click. Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit. The key to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn't a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords. In pay-per-click, the keywords you choose and the written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable. When you have selected affordable keywords and written specific descriptions, the next step is to choose your landing page. If you're running a pay-per-click campaign, you want customized "landing pages" for your visitors. Do NOT send them to your homepage! The first page a pay-per-click visitor receives should be a page relevant to the specific search phrase they used. This is the most common mistake made by novice pay-per-click advsertisers, and it costs them plenty. Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture (Yahoo)and Google Adwords, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit. If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war. Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis. Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success. Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity Lesson 5: Monitoring Search Engine Positions

Lesson 5: Monitoring Search Engine Positions

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve. This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions. Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage. In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It's the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately. Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely. Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn't become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions. You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor's position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor's position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results. Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month. This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out SearchEngineWatch.com for a current list of favorites. Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things. If all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines. Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole. Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. On the contrary, it could be that the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground. Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. It costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign. Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity

Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity

In the previous lesson, we learned how Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales. You're probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you're probably wondering, how do I make my link popular? Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the PageRank system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes. The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords. There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than "link farms" - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them! The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it. So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines. The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed. You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to "Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State." BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the "Fine Alpaca Wool" category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category. The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects - and both of your sites' link popularity. Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd. When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on. Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It's a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don't sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website. Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it's time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial. Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance. By the way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom! Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue. At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about. You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name. Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other. The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site. Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format. To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings. Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula. To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps. Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page. There are many free link popularity tools available to see who is linking to you. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website. Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way. Next time, we'll discuss more about increasing your link popularity and why it's so important. Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance

Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business. If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities. However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website. To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100). If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site. You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions. Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible. Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign. Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic

Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic

This post is the first of a multi-part series regarding website marketing. We hear from customers all the time who want their websites to perform well, but don't understand the complexity of the task. These articles will help you understand the fundamentals of marketing on the internet: traffic analysis, conversion rates, search engine marketing and promotion of your website. Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data. Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let's start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These figures are the most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site. There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic. The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis. The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is. It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been. Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page. If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page. As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign. Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the more valuable that keyword is. However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed - or should I say misdirected - to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations. Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success. Next time, we'll discuss the performance of your website and how to determine if your traffic is converting into sales.