Internet Marketing Clinic

In many of my class presentations, I take a few minutes to review the basics of a Google search operation. I just “stumbled upon” a great summary of the Google operation on the web.

This is a nice step-by-step guide to what happens when someone goes to Google and looks for something. It is all interesting, but the key parts for people wanting to get rankings for their sites is understanding the “index” database (where the engine stores all the information that will later be provided in a search, as well as the information that will determine who ranks where in the search results), and understanding the importance of the links that Google tabulates.

There is not much discussion here of where the links come from or how they are evaluated, but that is what we have the free Internet marketing Clinic for. Stop by some Wednesday evening when we are in session and see how we can help you promote your business over the web!

PS: If the StumbleUpon link above stops working, you can read the article at its original location here, “How Google Works“

Review sites are sites that feature reviews of other sites. These sites provide a valuable service by setting up referrals to your site and adding links directly to your site. You certainly need to be aware of anything that is said about your business on these sites, and it can be a good idea to encourage your satisfied clients or customers to go to these sites to give you a testimonial. Most of these sites will allow you to edit the information they have on the site about your business, and this is an important part of the process. You should definitely take the time to do this!

There are many of these sites around, but here is a list of some of the better known sites for you to work with:

• yelp.com
• killerstartups.com
• site-connect.net
• linkreferral.com
• dexknows.com
• b4usa.com

As with any list, the organizations listed can vary in their focus and requirements, so you have to investigate each one on the list to see whether it is appropriate for your site or business before you go to the trouble of submitting your site to them. In this case, in particular, you might want to get familiar with the site and the kind of traffic they have before you try to send any of your clients to the site to write reviews for you.

One effective way to publicize your site is to submit informational articles to sites that make the articles available to other web sites for republication. We have put together a short list of some sites that you might consider for this purpose:

• Top 50 Article Directory
• Isnare.com
• ArticleBase.com
• GoArticles.com
• Tumblr.com
• EzineArticles.com
• technorati.com
• Hubpages.com
• Zimbio.com

Some of these sites have different targeted demographics in their readership, so you have to look them over to see if your material is a fit. Don;t submit articles that do not fit in with the focus of the site your are submitting to. It is not only a waste of your time, but it could give you a bad reputation on the web, which will not do you any good!

Google’s latest algorithm update is anticipated to have an impact on web sites that might not have performed well under the prior algorithm. Comments on the Google Webmaster blog recently indicate that sites with lower traffic should perform better in searches typically described as “long tail” because they use keyword phrases that are not the high volume phrases that much SEO effort focuses its attention on.

What this means (we think?) is that the technique that we espouse in our clinic discussions of making sure that your site pays attention to all the phrases  that might be relevant to your content instead of focusing all your effort on just the top ranking phrases could experience a great boost in results. To put it another way, if you have worked on phrases when developing your content that are further down the list of ranking phrases, this might mean a big payoff for your approach!

This is the kind of thing we think is a great reward for “doing things the right way” from the beginning! As always, we try to provide you with the techniques that have staying power with search engines, not the “tricks” that fool the engines for a short time, but the practices that are consistent with improved quality of content and improved performance results for the search engines. We encourage a “win-win”approach to marketing, something that works for you and for the search engines at the same time.

This is the beginning step in a new marketing campaign using the new features and capabilities of Facebook.

Internet Marketing | Promote Your Page Too

The initial operation is to create a page in Facebook for the campaign and get a badge, as seen above, to use in promoting the page across different platforms. This blog post is sort of a “stream of consciousness” trail of what I am doing. There will be more entries to follow as I progress.

Many people are starting businesses these days, due to the job situation we are experiencing across the entire nation. The New York Times just ran an article describing how young entrepreneurs are starting businesses with little or no investment. Many of these businesses do not succeed, but many do, and some have become large and profitable businesses.

Marketing is one of the many challenges that new businesses face, and the internet provides one of the best tools a new business can have for reaching out to the world to let people know about a new product or service or provider. Read a short summary of the steps to starting a business to help you get your business going faster.

For years, business people in Houston and nearby cities have been coming to our free internet marketing clinic to learn how to market their businesses more effectively on the Internet. Do yourself and your business a great favor and join us!

The newsletter I get from eMarketer is one of my favorite sources of information about what is going on with businesses and marketing on the Internet. Today, they provide information about how businesses are using social media to improve their marketing efforts to other businesses.

We have talked in other postings about how social media can drive traffic directly to a web site, and how it can be used to improve brand awareness. These are fairly obvious applications of the medium, and are entirely consistent with the efforts we make at marketing through our web sites themselves.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the benefit that social media offers in doing research into customer attitudes and preferences. If your company has established a presence on social media, you have an opportunity to listen to what your audience is saying about your business. That kind of information can head off some serious customer relationship issues, on occasion, but can also contribute to strengthening y0ur marketing of your site in more traditional ways.

We are always on the lookout for keyword phrases that can be important to our audience, and, in particular, phrases that might be overlooked by our competition! Those phrases are of special interest because of the impact they can have on the specific audience we are trying to reach, and because they can be much easier to achieve very high rankings on!

Keep on top of this important medium by following our comments on social media marketing.

The Economist has a briefing on the future of the Internet that makes very interesting reading. It is not an article about marketing on the web, although it touches on that topic, but one comment in particular caught my attention as I was reading the piece.

“Take Facebook, the web’s biggest social network. The site is a fast-growing, semi-open platform with more than 500m registered users. Its American contingent spends on average more than six hours a month on the site and less than two on Google. Users have identities specific to Facebook and communicate mostly via internal messages. “

Two points here hit me; Facebook has 500 million users, and they spend 3 times more hours on Facebook per day than they do on Google. That is a big market to be in contact with, and Google is not the best way to reach them! If they are your demographic target, you need to be on Facebook to get to them effectively!

In our clinic, we have had much discussion about the pros and cons of using Facebook as a marketing tool. There are definitely legitimate concerns about spending a lot of time investing in a Facebook based marketing strategy, but there is no denying the numbers and their import. In marketing, you have to go where your audience is.

Using Facebook as a marketing tool is a different proposition from marketing pages on your web site. It is a different tool with different characteristics and requirements. The audience is also different in how they interact with the platform and what their expectations are while they are engaged. Good marketing has to take all these factors into account, but the principle remains. You have to respect your prospects and their preferences, and you have to go where they are in order to reach them!

For more information, read some of the material we have collected on this blog about Facebook and using social media for your marketing.

Marketing on the Internet is constantly changing, and it pays to stay in touch with what the changes are as they happen. eMarketer featured an interview about changes in retailing marketing that will be of interest to businesses in this market segment.

One interesting comment in this interview is, “I’m seeing retailers spend less in paid search and invest more in search engine optimization.” That indicates that ranking on organic results may get more difficult as more attention is paid to this method of getting attention on the Internet. That emphasized the importance of staying in  touch with the latest techniques for promoting your business on the web, and of continually working on your site to maintain the competitive position that you have achieved. As the saying goes, “Never look back, someone might be gaining on you!” Even if you are doing a great job and out-performing all your competition, you cannot afford to let up in your efforts.

Another comment that jumped out at me is, “It’s still a bit of a mystery as to how to monetize Facebook.” This is a medium that business has not mastered yet. That says two things to me. One is that if you don’t quite understand how to make use of this tool, you are not alone. The second is that if you can figure out how to make it work for you, you will be ahead of the pack!

Now this is not going to work for everyone, or for all kinds of businesses, but if you are in a position to benefit from the audience that you can reach through this tool (Note: I am specifically thinking of Facebook as I write this.), it can prove to be a powerful tool for you.

The way I am seeing this used to some good effect is for a business to create a Facebook Page for their business. It could be useful to create multiple pages for different product lines(?) Creating a page is not a big job and does not require a huge investment of your time or energy.

The next step is to get the page in front of an audience. You must have people who are willing to become  a fan of the page. When you have created this audience, what you do is post something of interest periodically to keep yourself and your business in front of your audience. The people who have signed up to get your information will see that while they are browsing their pages for information about their friends.

What kind of business might this be a good vehicle for? An easy answer might be restaurants. Restaurants are social businesses, and people are always interested in learning about new and interesting restaurants, and would be happy to learn about specials that a restaurant might be running or a new menu item they are introducing. And people are always interested in getting referrals to restaurants from their friends who like a place. If your business fits this kind of pattern, this could be a great tool for you to utilize. If your business is oilfield equipment, it could be a completely different situation!It all depends on you and how you can make this work for you!

Two recent articles present some interesting information about how the Internet is changing. One is in a eMarketer and the other in an article in Wired magazine.

The first talks about demographics on social media and points out how it is changing to an older crowd. In the group between 50-64, 47% use social media. This is a substantial representation. In the prime age group of 30-49, over 60% use social media. Facebook logged its 5oo millionth user in June of this year. That is a huge audience. And this is a worldwide group. Remember that this is more people than live in the United States.

These age groups tend to use the media in different ways from the younger group, an important consideration for marketers. Older users are involved in Facebook and Linked In, and have other differences in their pattern of use.

Ad spending for social media is also changing. This indicates that bigger companies recognize the appeal of this size audience and are working heard to find a position in it where they can capitalize on the attention that people pay to this medium. If you are in a retail business, you have to take this market seriously.

In the other article, the emphasis is on how traffic on the internet is changing. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between the web and the Internet. In broad terms, the Internet is the highway, and the web is destinations. That is an oversimplification, but useful and easy to remember.

This article points out that the volume of traffic on the Internet that is devoted to the web is now only 23% of the total volume of traffic! Keep in mind, this point is about traffic, not visitors. As marketers, we are interested in visitors. Traffic that comes from watching videos or listening to music consumes more bandwidth than traffic going to and from web sites, and that accounts for some of the huge change in where the volume of traffic comes from, but it still points to big changes in how the Internet is used.

What do these changes mean to your business, both in terms of threats and in terms of opportunities? It will certainly depend upon what segment of business you are in and what the demographics of your audience are, but no one will be unaffected by these changes. Pay attention so you will be on the bus instead of under it!