Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

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Internet Marketing for Dummies

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
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Internet marketing is known to be associated with many businesses due to its diversity amongst several business models, but because some companies don’t understand its advantages (and disadvantages) they choose not to use it. This is okay for some companies who may not have the money to spend on building a reputation for themselves online, but because the Internet is forever evolving more companies are beginning to put more money into the marketing scheme.

The purpose of this post to help you understand what Internet marketing is and how it can help your business evolve over time. You don’t need to have masses of money – you need to have time to spare to learn how companies (such as yourself) use the Internet to evolve. If you feel you can’t do the  job yourself then all hope is not lost – companies such as Weblinx can help you and your company create a reputation online.

What is Internet Marketing?

So what exactly is Internet marketing and why should I spend my money on it? Well there’s a lot of evidence that exists out there why you should think about investing in the market. Because the Internet is global it allows companies that are used to being local to spread world wide as long as they have the products or services that appeal to a big market. By competing in the same industry as other companies it can be a lot harder to convince people to use your company, but due to the interactive nature of Internet marketing you are able to respond quickly to web users with opinionative replies.

Different services are available through the Internet that allow you to market your products and services at little to no cost. Depending on your industry there is an ideal service that will be able to assist you in finding and attracting new customers that you may not be able to get through traditional advertising. Before deciding how you can intergrate Internet marketing into your business model to promote your products and services you should revise the possibilities. If your company depends on sales of goods then e-commerce may be the way to go for your company, or if your company offers a service which depends on leads then a website can be set up to collect details from possible clients to be contacted.

Internet marketing doesn’t have to be expensive either. Because statistics can be collected and analysed the right type of advertisement can be deployed without hoping for a hit or miss like you will get from traditional advertising. Traditional advertising can be things such as billboards, newspaper advertisements, radio adverts or TV adverts.

The statistical data that can be collected through Internet marketing can be an extremely helpful tool. By being able to discover what type of people are viewing your websites or advertisements you are able to research into what you can do to attract other people. By discovering trends such as genders, age and locations you can aim to please this trend of viewers or try and modify your Internet marketing attempts to please others just as much.

If you use Internet marketing and have any suggestions on what people can do to help promote themselves online then please leave a comment.

Internet Marketing

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Don’t Become a Twitter Zombie When It Concerns Your Internet Marketing

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
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Does your company own a Twitter account to help assist with your Internet marketing? Most likely you will do, as do a lot of people. The problem with companies using Twitter to help promote themselves is that they don’t use their accounts properly to gain all the benefits possible. The main issue is down to communication, by only posting links you will lose followers, not gain. This is what I call a “Twitter Zombie”.

Everyone who uses Twitter is a human normally but there are robots that have been set up to use Twitter accounts to spam. By communicating with your followers you are able to demonstrate that you are human rather than a robot. This is the best way to gain trust amongst your followers – the more they trust you the more they are going to trust the links you post – which is why it helps promote your company.

Ways to communicate with your followers are the following:

  • By tweeting questions such as “How are you?”, “What are you doing?” or “What interests you?” you are able to initiate a conversation with your followers.
  • By sending personal messages to individual followers you are able to ask them more personal questions about their business and other intentions.
  • Advertising competitions through Twitter is a great way to both promote your company and encourage followers to converse with you.

Twitter is a great social networking which allows you to socialise with people you may never have spoken to before. The better the chance you have in finding new people the better your choice in creating new clients.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Twitter | View Comments

Assist Your Internet Marketing With Twitter Trends

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
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If you own a Twitter account then you have probably noticed the the “Trending” module located at the bottom right of your homepage. Trends are certain keywords that have been tweeted the most that day which means trends are more likely to be news relevant rather than industry. This doesn’t mean trends can’t be utilised by yourself to give your account a surge of followers.

By using popular trends found in the “Trending” module your tweets will appear in the timeline for that keyword. This means if people view the timeline they make find your tweet amongst others. By ensuring the tweet you use is informative and relevant to the keyword people make choose to follow you. Nothing is definite as noone can control a humans actions, but by making the most of trending keywords you will give your profile some exposure to other Tweeters.

Every now and then you may strike gold with a trending keyword which has a sole purpose of attracting followers. This has happened previously and is bound to happen again so keep your eyes open for any trends you may be able to utilise to give your Twitter account more followers than you already have.

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Benefiting From Your Social Networking Accounts to Evolve Internet Marketing

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
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Have you created an account on a social networking website such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace for your Internet Marketing campaign but have no idea how to benefit from it? Allow me to help you. By understanding what you should be doing and why you should be doing it you will be able to achieve more from your social networking accounts than you may be doing at this moment. It doesn’t take much knowledge, the only thing you must have available is time to spend conversing with the public.

The main thing you must understand when using a social networking account is that it does what it says on the tin – it allows you to become social with the public through the Internet. By neglecting your friends (Facebook & MySpace) or followers (Twitter) you will only lose numbers rather than gain them. By commencing conversation with different people you are able to make new contacts that you may not come across through the use of your website which will encourage more people to come to you rather than away.

By uploading media content for the public to view you are able to collect opinions and once again encourage the public to talk to you. By uploading media such as photos, videos or music you have the chance to show people what you can do. Ever heard of the saying “All talk and no action”, well this is where you can prove them wrong. Features like this are available for a reason, by taking advantage of what is available you have a better chance in making numbers instead of losing them.

You can ask existing contacts to help promote your profile by either posting or tweeting a link to your profile on their account. By giving your profile exposure on other established profiles you have a better chance in attracting more people. It’s not always so simple as to leave you account to wait for people to come to it, by giving the public a “doorway” to your profile they are more likely to visit it rather than ignore it.

I’m positive other advice is available to people who want to help their Internet marketing campaign evolve with the use of social networking so if anyone has any tips please leave a comment below.

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Posted in Facebook, Internet Marketing, MySpace, Social Networking, Twitter | View Comments

Does Retweeting Assist Internet Marketing?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
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Have you ever come across a Retweet button on a website that you’ve viewed in the past? Most likely you will have seen one at some point or another – in fact there is one on this page right now. The purpose behind the Retweet button is simple, by being able to allow Twitter members to post a link to the page being viewed you are benefiting from free promotion.

The question is does retweeting assist Internet marketing? The answer is yes. Since we embedded Retweet buttons on our blog recently we have noticed an increase in traffic from not only search engines such as Google but also from Twitter itself. This is because some of our past posts have had well over 100 retweets at a time which means hundreds of different accounts are posting links to even more accounts. Not only is it an effortless process but it is also free which means money can be spent more on other areas of Internet marketing than on the social media area. This doesn’t mean money should be spent on social related websites, but by giving people the chance to do the promotion for yourselves most of the jobs for you are already done.

So how do you convince people to Retweet your pages/posts? By having fresh, relative and innovative content displayed you are more likely to encourage readers to use the Retweet button. From there it’s just a matter of leaving the content to the public and creating new pages/posts to continue the Retweeting.

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Search Engine Optimisation for Smaller Budgets

Monday, May 24th, 2010
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Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a well known method of ensuring websites are search engine friendly. By making sure your website is compatible with search engines you are more likely to rank higher than websites which aren’t optimised enough or at all. The problem with SEO is that most companies choose to use companies who work in the SEO industry which can cost a lot in the long run, something smaller companies may struggle with. This is by no means a smaller companies fault, bigger companies generally have a bigger budget which means they can splash out on the best SEO services money can buy, whilst smaller companies may only to be able to afford the basics.

What people do not think about is that SEO doesn’t have to cost money. Search engine optimisation can be learnt by anyone who has the time to sit and research the topic thoroughly, which is why bigger companies choose to hire other companies to do the work so no time is wasted. For smaller companies learning SEO basics is a better option.

The best approach is to define keywords that target your industry, products or events first. The best way to do this is to look for trends in certain words that are relevant to your company, whether it be computers, graphics, music, there are plenty of keywords that you can use.

Once you’ve found the keywords that are perfect for your SEO campaign you must optimise your website for these selected words. This is to help you increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines result pages. The higher your website is ranked the better your chances of attracting visitors, resulting in more money for you. It doesn’t matter whether your website is an ecommerce website or just for advertisement purposes, there is money to be made through your website and by optimising your website correctly you will be able to get it. Insert the chosen keywords in the title page, meta tags and other content segments – ensuring that it sounds natural and not jibberish.

Once you’ve added your keywords in the correct areas you should look into signing up on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. This is a great way of attracting additional traffic through to your website by targetting the public in a more social approach than in your face.

Once you’ve done all this you will only ever need to make slight adjustments such as adding extra keywords or registering on other social media websites.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Ranking | View Comments

Using Goals in Google Analytics

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
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If your running a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign on your website then it’s important to track your progress. By being able to see certain statistics such as number of visitors or page views you are able get a better idea of what people think of your website and whether it needs improving at all. The best way to track statistical data from your website is using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is easy to setup for your website and once you have an account setup and the tracking code has been added to your website you are able to do things such as set goals. Goals are very useful as they can help you make decisions through data collected from your website and by being able to see how people react to different pages on your website you can capitalise instantly before a running trend appears. There are different goals you can set for your website, whether it’s purely for advertisement or an ecommerce site, you can utilise them to your advantage.

  1. If a contact form exists on your website then you can track how many people contact you using the online form. The best way to do this is by creating a thankyou page which will be displayed once the contact form is used. The thankyou page would then be used to count how many people have used the contact form.
  2. If you have documents available for download then by tracking which documents are downloaded the most you are able to see which is most popular. You can then place the download around the website in better areas for your visitors to find.
  3. If you have an ecommerce website then by tracking visitors through the payment process you are able to see how many people opt out and then make changes to avoid this happening next time.

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to help your website improve, create an account on Google Analytics and set up some goals now.

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Is Your SEO Company Perfoming?

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
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Typically the reason most companies use SEO companies is because they don’t know what they are doing pure and simple, or that they would rather concentrate on the business more than the website. This is fine but without the knowledge of what is being done it is hard to know if anything is being done at all which means the money you’ve used to invest into a company may go to waste. Most search engine optimisation companies will send ranking reports showing where the website ranked for chosen keywords before and after, but this isn’t always a perfect indication of how well they are performing to get your website the ranking it deserves.

When you first sign up for a SEO company to work on your website you are usually tied up in a contract which means switching companies isn’t always possible, so by being able to keep an eye on how well your chosen SEO company is performing you will be able to get your money’s worth without the need of moving to another company. We have many different posts on our blog to help you learn about SEO which will help you find different gaps that may have been left by your SEO company. You can’t leave it to chance that your chosen SEO company will find and eradicate mistakes, by being able to find the mistakes you will be able to ask your SEO company to resolve the issues and help optimise your website better.

If there are any pointers you know of that can help other readers then please leave a comment, the more the better.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Ranking | View Comments

Press Releases; Should You Pay For Them?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
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For those of you that don’t know what a press release is they are articles posted to websites which are regularly crawled by search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. Articles typically contain news about companies, events or products in a third person style, similar to a newspaper but without the paper or cheesy header (sometimes). Images and links are also available on some press releases depending on the service used to submit them, which is where this blog post is going, do you really need to pay for press releases?

After posting a large amount of press releases on different websites I’ve noticed a common trend in features which are available on most services. I’ve noticed that services which require a payment will offer one or two extras such as more link inclusions, more image inclusions, video inclusions, etc. But do you really need all this to get a good press release on search engines? I don’t think so.

Just like blog posting it all depends on the content you are using. If the press release doesn’t interest people then most likely the press release will end up collecting dust whilst other more interesting ones are read by much more people. So by paying for press releases you are only risking losing the money you’ve spent, so why spend money when free services allow you to post your articles? There’s only one reason usually and that is noticeably when the service has a high page ranking. This is good if the press release does well, but there is a risk of losing money, and for small companies this money may be the only money they have to spend on Internet marketing, therefore I recommend looking into free services.

Don’t be tricked into thinking that by being able to include tons of links in your press release you will get back links to your website, this doesn’t always happen as search engines despise link spamming. By being able to include 2-3 links you are going to get just as much affect as you would from tons of links, and usually free services allow you to include links, another reason why paying is useless.

Another benefit that paid services offer is the inclusion of images. Images do make your article look presentable but that’s all they do, they don’t make your press release any better than any other article, so why spend money on making your article pretty when you could spend it on getting quality back links from other websites?

The main thing to think about is how much money you have to spend. If you have enough to spend on different Internet marketing tools then paid services may be the way to go, but for smaller companies I recommend the use of free services to get some traffic for no money than risk no traffic for some money.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Press Releases, Search Engine Optimisation | View Comments

Internet Marketing is Where Your Money Should be

Monday, May 10th, 2010
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If your one of those companies that prefer to do things the old way then you need to wake up and smell the roses because these days it most likely won’t work. Due to Internet being the most used thing across the world amongst other things you should put most of your money into Internet marketing rather than other marketing strategies. It has been proven that Internet marketing definitely works much better due to services such as search engines, social media, social networking, etc.

So what should you invest your money and time into to promote your company? There are plenty of different services you can use but some are specific to industries, but this doesn’t mean certain services are available to everyone. For example, the most utilised campaign used by website is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO helps your website get found by search engines and helps rank your website highly amongst other websites in the same industry. The better optimised the website the higher the ranking, thus resulting in more traffic due to its appearance on search engine results pages. It is said that most people will only use links that are located on the first page of search engines rather than lower pages.

Other areas which should be utilised are social media and social networking. By using these services you are able to communicate with other registered users and get your voice heard by more people than you would be able to through other strategies such as newspaper adverts, cold calling, etc. The better you are known and the higher your reputation on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Tumblr you are able to get more people interested in you and what you have to say. Blogging is another highly recognised form of advertisement due to people being able to subscribe to posts, keeping them up to date with new posts with information specific to the blogs purpose, whether it be tutorials, images, videos, someone will care about what you post and will subscribe.

Even further there are other services which can be used depending on your industry. Websites such as YouTube, MySpace, DeviantArt, which help promote media rather than websites.

So as you can see, no matter what industry you work in you are able to promote your company through the Internet. The better you promote yourself the more recognisable your company will become, resulting in new clients, which means more money for you, money money money.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | View Comments

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