Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’
6 Internet Marketing Articles You Really Ought to Read
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them
by Todd Malicoat
“What is a backlink?” is one of the top five most frequently asked questions I get from clients and colleagues. My short answer is that a backlink is a link from another website or blog to your website. It’s like a vote of popularity for your website and backlinks are a crucial but often ignored aspect of improving your website’s rankings. There are many types of backlinks and although this article is a few years old, it’s still a great explanation of the types of links you can get to your website. Hopefully it will help “backlinks” go from something that seems beyond your control to something you can put on your To Do List.
Comprehensive Guide to Key word Research, Selection & Organization
by Stony DeGeter
I firmly believe that key phrase research and selection is the foundation of – not just an SEO campaign – an effective overall internet marketing campaign. Fail to target phrases or target the wrong ones and you will wind up wasting many hours and lots of dollars. While I don’t agree with everything Stony says, if you read all 12 of these articles, you will know just about everything you need to know about finding, selecting and prioritizing the right key phrases.
The First Three Questions
by Joe Hage
The most challenging part of my job is getting clients to dig deep and go beyond describing “What I Do” and getting them to describe “These are the results I provide and the benefits of hiring me.” Joe’s article helps me help my clients start thinking about their business in a new way. I suggest you read it, write about it and incorporate your thoughts into you website copy. It will definitely help improve the conversion rate of your website.
What Makes a Good Blog?
by Merlin Mann
Most of the time when I see yet another “What Makes a Good Blog (Post)” article, I want to gouge out my eyeballs. This version actually has important stuff you should know by a guy who’s in a position to know.
50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics
by Kissmetrics.com
This list of Google Analytics resources includes everything you ever wanted to know about Google Analytics from tutorials for beginners, to tips and tricks and tools and hacks for advanced users.
Blogger Outreach
by Matt Dickman
Contacting bloggers who might be willing to write about your product or service is a great low cost way to attract clients and build your expert-factor online. If you’ve ever read The Bad Pitch Blog, you know even seasoned PR people make stupid mistakes when it comes to pitching to bloggers. If you follow the advice in this blog post, you will go along way to preventing any accidental foot-in-mouth learning experiences.
Tags: articles, best of, blog posts, internet marketing
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Make Your Copy Work by Entering into the Conversation
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
You know when you’re reading website copy that’s compelling and gets the job done. Even if it’s for a product or service you don’t need, you want to bookmark the site or forward the URL to someone who needs it. You want to take action! But, do you know why it’s good?
Nine times out of ten it’s because the good copy enters into the conversation the reader is having in their mind. This is especially important on the internet because
Writing for the internet is different from other forms of advertising because of how people access the information. Other than the phone book, I can’t think of an advertising method where your potential customers are actively looking for you. They have a problem and are looking for a solution. So it makes sense that most copy writing coaches and courses subscribe to the problem/solution/benefit model.
It’s been my experience that writing compelling copy is a process of evolution. Typically we start with “This is who I am and these are my services.” When this fails to yield results, we go to the problem/solution/benefit model. Most service professionals stay stuck at this level. They wonder why they don’t get more clients from the internet and live with poor internet marketing results.
If you do the hard work of crafting copy that enters into the conversation going on in your prospect’s mind, it will improve all your results from newsletter sign ups to phone calls.
Take a look at the following websites:
http://www.sensiblecoaching.com/
http://www.millionairemind.com/
Now I’m really not trying to slam Shell’s website. For all I know, she’s perfectly happy with the copy on her home page. However, when you compare it to T. Harv’s you can see the difference. Where Shell starts with a list of problems, T. Harv’s jumps right into “Have you ever wondered why this is the case? Here’s why that’s the case.”
Although they’re both selling products designed to help you change your relationship to money, T. Harv’s is more likely to make the reader say “This guy has the solution to my problem! I want that!” He assumes you’re both discussing the same problem and puts the majority of his word toward describing his solution and benefits, benefits, benefits.
You can even see this difference in their domain names. Would you rather have ‘sensible coaching’ or a ‘millionaire mind’?
Tags: enter the conversation, internet marketing, internet marketing best practices, website copywriting, website text
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
What You Need to Know about Internet Marketing (in 500 words)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Internet marketing is often overwhelming and confusing. As if designing your website to rank well and getting other websites to link to it weren’t hard enough, now you have to factor Web 2.0 and all that entails into your internet marketing mix.
I’ll be honest with you, it even drives me nuts. And I do this stuff for a living! But, I wrote a proposal for a new client today and found myself creating a brief summary of what’s involved with internet marketing.
The goal of internet marketing is to sell stuff. Whether that’s a physical product, an information product or a service, it doesn’t matter. The ultimate goal is to sell something.
There are two main components to internet sales; drive more traffic to your website and convert that traffic by giving the visitor what they want.
This sounds pretty basic but it’s easy to lose sight of the primary goal. We tend to focus on statistics like: how high my website ranks for certain key words, or how many unique visitors were there last month, or how many people signed up for my newsletter or blog feed. But you know what? Ultimately, none of that matters! What matters is how much money you made!
Selling stuff comes down to two things: driving traffic to your website and converting traffic into customers.
Driving traffic to the website can be done in two ways.
1. Your customer is looking for you. They have a problem and they are actively looking for a solution. They go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo, type in a key phrase and find your website in the search results.
2. Your customer may be aware that they have a problem but aren’t necessarily looking for a solution. They hear about your company in an article, blog, forum, podcast, video, social media or social networking website and because they like what they hear, they visit your website.
When people land on your website, it’s time to give them what they want. It’s a lot of work to get customers to your website and once they’re there, if you don’t give them what they want you’ve wasted your time and money. That’s why a customer centric website is crucial to converting visitors to customers. It’s also the most commonly overlooked piece of the sales process.
I’m not going to tell you what your website should say because I could write the most brilliant description and the vast majority of you are going to tell yourself, “My website says that.”
You know what? It doesn’t! I will straight up bet you $100 (donated to your favorite charity) that I can find 10 things on your website that are not turning visitors into customers.
Want to know why visitors are not customers? Have a friend (who doesn’t owe you anything and will tell you the truth) look over your website. Then shut your mouth, stop defending it and listen. Your bank account will thank you for it.
Tags: converting visitors, driving traffic, internet marketing, internet marketing best practices, turning visitors into customers
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
How Internet Marketing Works
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
I recently signed up for Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge. I highly recommend it. It’s no BS, straight ahead, good info about how to make money online. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
As part of signing up for the Thirty Day Challenge, I get a few promotional emails. Nothing outrageous just emails about their other products. One of those emails was about their membership site called Immediate Edge. The sales page has a great 30 minute video where Ed essentially explains how internet marketing (aka making money online) works. Yeah, he promotes his product a bit but it’s just to demonstrate how it can help.
If you’ve ever wondered, “How the heck do you make money from the internet!” you need to watch this video.
Tags: Immediate Edge, internet marketing, making money online, Thirty Day Challenge
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hi Folks. I’m back. Did you miss me?
Monday, September 8th, 2008
So why the silence? Stompernet. It’s all their fault. Stompernet is an advanced internet training program started and run by people who have made gobs of money on the internet. And when I say gobs I mean many, many millions of dollars.
You can throw a proverbial rock on the internet and hit a marketing guru who will sell you their million dollar internet marketing program. The only problem is that they’re the only one making a million dollars. Stompernet is different. The price of poker ain’t cheap at $800 a month. But it’s worth it. Each month when I ask myself if I can afford it, the answer is “yes.” There have been office hours when the resources I’ve learned about or the “This is how I do it” from internet millionaires have been worth the $800 alone.
So what did I do with my summer? I worked my butt off! There was no vacation. There wasn’t even a stay-cation! And I couldn’t be more excited! I am ready to kick butt and make some serious money. My goal for this blog in the next months is to share with you what I’m learning about. I hope you find it helpful. Let me know what you think, what you’d like to see more of and any questions you have.
Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing best practices, Stompernet
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
How NOT to Use Articles to Improve Your Rankings
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
The company that ranks #1 for “internet marketing articles” has quite a few articles on the subject. I’m sure it took a lot of work to write all those articles but I’d be willing to bet all that work hasn’t paid off. Why?
First, consider the words used buy people looking to buy a service versus people looking for information.
When people want to find a service provider, they use words like:
Consultant
Consulting
Strategy
Expert
When people are looking for information, they use words like:
Articles
Case studies
Examples
Information
Data
Second, the articles tell you how to do something but they don’t show you why you should hire this search engine optimization firm. The author could argue that the purpose of the articles is to build the perception of expertise. Providing good information is one way to do it but these articles aren’t particularly well written or all that helpful.
If you’re going to try to improve your website’s rankings with articles make sure your articles demonstrate your expertise AND subtly show the reader why they should hire you to do the job. Otherwise, you will just wind up with a bunch of looky-loos and no customers.
(*I’m giving them a link for “internet marketing articles” as a consolation prize for being my “how not to do it” example.)
Tags: internet marketing, seo, writing articles
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
RSS Feed
Atom Feed