Internet Marketing Tips

Posts Tagged ‘Ecommerce’

My review of Niche Blueprint coming soon.

Today’s business person is faced with many decisions when it comes to marketing and advertising. How to get started and what media to use in your marketing campaigns are just a couple of the immediate challenges. The reality is that all of the options available will work to one degree or another. The key to your success, regardless of the medium you select, is to differentiate yourself in a manner that appeals to your prospect. When you understand this, you can be successful regardless of your selection.

Very often people follow the generally accepted trends and styles. This happens with the clothes we wear (anyone remember Beatle Mania?), the beer we drink (what age are you) and the way we advertise in publications such as the Yellow Pages. Look in the Yellow Pages and you will see page after page of similar looking business card layouts and wording. What happens is we start to mentally purge the look-a-likes and carry on until we see something that is different.

Some of the most interesting, and different, ads that I have seen appear as a public service announcement. They have headlines like: Warning! Don’t Even Think of Using a Travel Agent Before Calling FREE Traveler Awareness Hotline! Copy below this ad would offer free advice on how to book the best rate for your next trip. I was scanning the travel section because I was obviously interested in taking a trip and this advertisement, because it was different, caught my eye. To make it really successful it also had an 800 number at the bottom to call for a Free Report. There was no ad sponsor so the whole presentation was non-threatening. I was given a safe way to get information I wanted without having to speak directly to a Travel Agent whose job it is to sell me.

This same method can be used regardless of the medium you select for your advertising. It can be Yellow Pages, Business Cards and Val-Pak Coupons. The key is to use the criteria that make it different, interesting and non-threatening. Even though the principles are basic there is an art to this type of marketing.

I have learned of a company, that over the last 12 years, has developed automated systems that allow business people to incorporate any type of marketing and/or advertising into an overall Marketing Strategy. That company is Automated Marketing Solutions or AMS. They differentiate themselves by not only providing solutions, but by educating their clients on the proper techniques to use including how to create the right message by the form of media being used. It doesn’t stop there. AMS provides the capability for a company to place their ENTIRE Marketing Program on Auto-pilot. Once a business marketing program (including voice messages, e-mails, faxes and other broadcast and mail out collateral) is compiled and sequenced, their Lead Management System or LMS provides the unique ability to control and manage the program without any further human interaction.

The benefits to this system include significant time savings on what would otherwise be labor intensive tasks. It also provides consistency in marketing messages. It also means that businesses never need worry about losing customers who misinterpreted your lack of contact for lack of interest. To learn more about Direct Response Marketing and how it can benefit your business, visit Automated Marketing Solutions today. See how quickly and economically you can implement and start benefiting from AMS tested and proven technology and experience.

Having an active marketing method that delivers a constant stream of high quality web traffic is definitely an achievable task. In order to gain traffic you need a big web presence, and to get a substantial presence first of all you have to have a good quality website that Google can easily read, and second, a back-catalogue of good quality links pointing at your site from as many other authority sites as possible.

It’s not as difficult as it may sound to achieve this, in fact, considering the amount of systems in place willing to do it all for you, it can be reasonably easy. The first concept you’ll need to understand is that not all link are equal. A good way of judging how valuable a link from a particular site will be, is by checking its Google Page Rank. This is a system whereby Google ranks pages from zero o ten based on how much it values the quality of the content on a given page. Ten being the best, zero being the worst. Sites with no Page rank (below 0) either haven’t been found by google yet, or have been blacklisted from the Google listings and should be avoided.

In a perfect world, we’d all have lots of links from the home-pages PR-10 sites, however the fact that there are only around 10 PR-10 sites that exist somewhat hinders this approach, and those 10 or so won’t usually link to many other websites because they don’t need to, have nothing to gain from it, and would never stop receiving link requests. Even slightly lower PR sites, like PR-7/8s are very picky about who they link to. These highly ranked sites are known as “authority” sites and tend not to link to lower ranked sites (not very often anyway) because they simply have nothing to gain from it.

Your mission is to get as many sites with some PR or the potential to soon get some PR to link to you as possible. This means in effect that getting a link from a newish site that hasn’t been live long, has no PR but is working on link building is a good strategy to adopt in the longer term. Google only allocated PR twice per year, so if you are unlucky you might need to wait months in order to gain some PR. The amount you are given will depend upon the link juice you squeeze from all the sites that link to you. The more, high pr sites you receive a link from, the higher your PR will ultimately be.

How do you get links? This is the question. You can search online for sites that link to other sites, as there are many reciprocal link management sites around. The problem with these sites is that reciprocal links are being downgraded by the major search engines as they are increasingly being seen as an arrangement between two sites in order to gain a link. They have not been discounted completely however as it is natural for sites to reciprocate links for example between customer and supplier etc.

Easily the quickest and most effective way to reach the top of search engine result is by getting one way links, IE, getting sites to put a link to your site on theirs without linking back. This can however be quite hard because people tend to want something in return.

You may have problems achieving these one way links if you only have one website. There are a few answers to this issue, but one way link management is the clear way to go.

With one way link management your site is entered into a triangle-like arrangement in that your website (website A) links to website B which links to website C which links back to website A (you), so effectively, you will all benefit from a one way link, and if this process is repeated (IE. one way link management), you will be rewarded with a rise in the rankings as the search engines cannot track this type of linking, therefore it appears natural.

As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of the same.

The first thing that you need to do is collect the data. If you have web analytics tool handy, it would take care of the same. You must ensure that you have included all the data collecting parts of your website. These parts could be the CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and any other data that may be generated by the website.

The next step would be to transform the collected data into an understandable format that can be manipulated further. Reviewing the log file manually could be a hectic task. A web analytics tool would serve well here, making it easy to convert the collected data into understandable data. However, if some of your data is in the non-web log format like CGI, you will need to covert it yourself.

Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend:

Does your traffic flow increase at a specific time? Which pages get visited more often? How many pages does an average visitor visit? How long does your visitor stay at the site? How much traffic are you able to draw from search engines. Which pages act as exit points for your visitors? What are your inbound links?

After having done the data collection, and transformation of the same into reports, it is time to set new goals. Now that you know what your good and points are; you can build up on the good points and improve on the weak points. You may wish to add business links to your most visited pages, and promote the lesser visited pages. The idea should be to bank on your strengths to achieve more, and lift up your weakness to convert them into strengths.

Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.

You would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always.