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Top 3 Areas of Focus for Your 2011 Internet Marketing Plan- Part 3
Area #3- Begin a consistent SEO effort.
Getting ranked on Page 1 of Google can have a significant impact on your business revenue and means that you get free traffic to website. Of course, it is up to your website and offer to convert your visitors from Google into a lead or sale (more detail on that is provided within the sample marketing plan and marketing plan template available here), but why not put forth the concerted effort to gain access to these prospects?
Do some keyword research to find 4 – 12 search terms that get a decent amount of traffic (at least 75 searches per day) and ones that aren’t too highly competitive. Your goal will be to be ranked on Google Page 1 for these keywords within 3-6 months.
There are 2 main areas to focus on for your Search Engine Optimization effort.
- On-page
- Off-page
On-page optimization has to do with the way your website is constructed. This includes making sure to have the keywords in your website meta title, description, and keywords. Also be sure to use your keywords several times within the content of the page you are focused on for the term. Activity is also a factor, so be sure to update your website weekly- a blog is a good way to do this.
Off-page optimization is all about link building. Google will highly value your website if it thinks other websites value your content. The way it measures this is if other websites are linking to your website. Links can be built in a variety of ways, but include press releases, video submissions, article submissions, 3rd party blog creation, and commenting on other’s blogs or articles.
For more information about SEO components, check out the marketing plan sample on this site.
Posted in : Marketing Plan, Marketing Plan Template, Sample Internet Marketing Plan, Sample Marketing Plan, Sample Marketing Strategy | No Comment »
Top 3 Areas of Focus for Your 2011 Internet Marketing Plan- Part 2
Tweak Your Offer.
Your offer is the thing of value that you are offering to your targeted audience that visits your website. I like to call it an irresistible offer, as in, one that your target audience can not resist desiring. They can have it- all they have to do is let you know who they are, such as providing you with their email address. You can of course ask for more information from them, just know that it will decrease the number of people that take you up on your offer. Some will not find your offer irresistible enough to provide, for instance, their first name in addition to their email address. I recently dropped the first name field from an opt-in box and received a 20% opt-in conversion rate versus the 15% I had been converting. If you do not have an irresistible offer on your website, be sure to download the free sample marketing plan and marketing plan template on this site.
So although we want to make the offer completely irresistible, we must also know that it is truly only going to be irresistible to maybe 5%-20% of your visitors, even IF YOU DO IT CORRECTLY. Remember, the vast majority of websites, (I would guess north of 95%), do not have any free irresistible offer that gather information from their visitors. So if we at least gather 5% of visitor’s information, we are doing pretty good.
But why not constantly aim for improvement? Here are 5 ways that you can tweak your offer with very little work on your part:
- Only ask for the bare minimum info on the opt-in form- email address. If you need to ship something physical to an address, you can take them to a secondary form after the initial opt-in.
- Make the offer more prominent. Try emphasizing the offer by outlining it in a bright color or with dashed lines.
- Move the offer to another part of your page. Upper right-hand corner is great and be absolutely sure your visitor doesn’t have to scroll down to see it, because most visitors do not scroll!
- Change the wording on your offer title. You never know, a small substitute of a word can have a noticeable impact in your conversion rate.
- Reference another special bonus if they opt-in. People like bonuses, so give them something else for free.
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Top 3 Areas of Focus for Your 2011 Internet Marketing Plan
Area #1
Google never sleeps…or quits monkeying around with things. Luckily for the user, these things are very often for their benefit and warrant additions to your Internet marketing plan.
During the past year, Google has put forth a lot of effort into their services for local businesses. These efforts can be viewed upon searching for things like Sushi restaurants, orthopedic surgeons and hair salons alike, and are in a section called Google Places. It is the area towards the top of the search results page that lists businesses and their location on an adjacent map. A searcher can click to go to a special page Google allows for each business to describe their product or service and even list special discounts and multiple images.
These listings are absolutely 100% FREE. These listings rank above national companies that pour tons of money into search engine optimization and are more prominently displayed that most of the pay-per-click advertisers that are paying Google.
I have read that 80-90% of people looking for a local business search the Internet, either at a computer or on their mobile phone. This makes sense, especially given that some cities are now doing away with the printing of yellow pages books. If you have a local business, you absolutely MUST claim your listing in Google Places and add as much information as possible to it.
If you have already claimed your Google Places page, the next thing to do is see how high you can make your placement (such as A, B, or C listing). This is not all dependent upon how near the business is to the person searching. It has other factors such as reviews and citations (listings) from other directory websites.
Encourage your happy customers to write reviews online. Your competitors likely only have a few, so if you can just get one customer to write a review online, you will have 52 by the end of the year.
You should be getting your customers email addresses anyway, so you can email them a link to the review site. Your sample marketing plan and template include areas for Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
If your time and marketing funds are limited, be sure to at least devote some effort to your free Google Places page for your 2011 Internet Marketing Plan.
J. Tate
Posted in : Marketing Plan, Marketing Plan Template, Sample Internet Marketing Plan, Sample Marketing Plan | No Comment »
Creating Effective FaceBook Business Pages
I’ll go ahead and state the obvious…FaceBook is pretty darn popular. 500 million users- and many of those users spend an unthinkable portion of their day on the site. But is there a real business application there? Yep, there are several.
Here is one of the uses- the News Feed. Whenever a business posts a message on its FaceBook page, that message appears in all of News Feed messages for everybody that has “Liked” its page. If there is a special offer it wants to promote, this is a great tool to use to get the word out to customers and others that are interested in the business.
But the key thing is that these people must have already gone to the FaceBook page and clicked on the “Like” button.
Effective FaceBook pages encourage visitors to the page to click on the “Like” button.
Oh yeah, when somebody indicates they Like your page, that also goes into the News Feed of everybody that that person is Friends with! That is the how awareness of your business product or service can grow virally.
An article at Speckyboy.com put together a list of FaceBook Business pages that did a nice job of creating an incentive on their page for visitors to click the Like button and/or direct them to take action to do so.
There aren’t too many businesses that couldn’t benefit from including FaceBook in their Internet marketing plan.
J. Tate
Posted in : Sample Internet Marketing Plan | No Comment »
The Best Guru is YOU
Most of us have purchased a product, book or course and expected it to transform us (weight, personal life, money). Frank Kern wrote a terrific blog post about what it really takes to be transformed by what a guru tells us.
It turns out, it is on us, not the guru! How about that? The nerve of him to say that!
Unless we take educated effort, determination, and then stick to it, what we may have learned from a guru will have done no good. The capability is within each of us to get the results that are promised to us from the guru, but the guru only plays a small role. Providing some how-to and a touch of motivation. That’s it. The rest has to come from us.
Here is a great segment from Frank’s blog article:
“Imagine a guy wanting to lose weight (ahem). How many books does he need to buy? For the love of God, it’s easy! Put the fork down and walk around for a few hours a day.
Do that for a month or so and you’ll weigh less. (Duh!)
That’s been the winning formula forever, right?
But There’s A Gazillion Dollar Industry
Delivering “New” Weight Loss Stuff Every Day!
There’s a new diet book every 20 minutes or so it seems.”
The problem is that getting it done is actually the hard part. We find resistance. We screw it up the first time we try it. Most then quit.
The same is true for planning. You can have a terrific marketing plan template, but if the steps aren’t taken to actually apply it, then all it did was waste time in creating it.
J. Tate
Posted in : Marketing Plan Template | 1 Comment »
For Small Business, IT Can Be Time Vampire
A USA Today article in the money section this week titled, “Small-business owners might need outside help with tech“, was about the fact that technology is changing quickly and there are many things that a small business owner needs to be doing technology-wise to make sure their business stays on top. These requirements include keeping up on security patches, to making sure backups occur regularly, and that the latest software updates occur.
Now, the definition for small business covers many many types of businesses and sizes. A four person operation is vastly different than an 80 person operation, but the article makes no mention of the business size being a consideration in an IT plan. I personally think that a business with under 20 people shouldn’t even consider purchasing and maintaining their own servers. There are far too many excellent services available now that will provide small businesses with the storage and applications they need to effectively run their business. These have
various names, with the most recent and popular being “cloud” computing. If all critical applications and databases are used or maintained by 3rd party companies then all the small business owner needs to do is make sure that employees have computers with automatic virus protection and that they are using a reliable Internet service provider.
IT issues are complete time vampires…
They suck your valuable time right out of you. Spend this time executing a new marketing campaign from your marketing plan to bring in new business rather than figuring out why an employee’s email software won’t open!
(There- that’s the tie-in to marketing!!)
J. Tate
Posted in : Marketing Plan, Small Business Plan | No Comment »