Tracking

If you have spent time and money on SEO or any other type of online marketing, you have prepped your website to become another salesperson. In any sales organization, sales people are measured by their performance. You should have the same set-up for your online marketing.

You most likely have some type of web analytics you use. It tells you all kinds of cool stuff about your visitors, but is it set-up to tell you about your leads? Most analytics have a way to set-up some sort of lead tracking. In Google Analytics you would want to configure your goals and funnels so you can go back and learn more about your leads. If you use RhinoSEO, you have a lead management system built-in.

You want to have a way to look at how your visitors became leads.

Analyze

It is important to learn from your leads and analytics. When you are lucky enough to get new web leads, take a minute to analyze how they became a lead. Some of the things you’ll want to look at are:

• Referring source
• Visitor navigation
• Visitor frequency

Referring source is probably the main thing you will want to look at. This can give you a lot of insight as to how people are finding your site. This give you the opportunity to evaluate how well your online marketing efforts are working. It can also shed some light into how your prospects search or which inbound links are sending you quality traffic.

This information can help you tailor your online marketing strategy around what works instead of wasting time on what doesn’t. Find what is working and why and do your best to replicate it.

Visitor navigation tells you what your prospects and leads are most interested in. You can see what product/services were most viewed and for how long. This will help you custom tailor your sales pitch and drip marketing around what you know they like.

Visitor frequency is how many times someone visits your site. Find out more about your online sales cycle. People might visit 2-3 times before they fill out a form. Make on site tweaks and monitor if you can shorten the amount of visits it takes before they convert into a lead.

The more you learn about how visitors become leads, the more successful your online marketing and conversions will become.

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SEO

SEO is the foundation of any solid online marketing strategy. A well optimized site puts the business in position to be found by thousands of potential customers who are actively searching for what you offer. SEO is a strong force for a websites success, but it isn’t the only online marketing tactic that will drive qualified traffic.

Social Media

SEO is perfect for pulling in targeted visitors to your site, although search engine optimization takes time. Social media is a great way to get your message to the masses fast. Social media helps you connect with your audience, gives your business a voice and allows your messages an opportunity to go viral. A well planned social media strategy can send thousands of visitors to your website in a short period of time building brand awareness and new backlinks to your site.

Email Marketing

How to you maximize your contacts and leads? Email marketing. Create campaigns to stay in front of your prospects and customers so you increase the chances of repeat visitors and conversions. Use marketing emails to educate and promote. Add social media elements to your email marketing to really maximize your reach.

PR

The lines between social media and PR are beginning to blur a little. Both are effective and work in similar ways. Use press releases on a regular basis to announce new news about your company and industry. Solid PR can spread your messages to the masses.

Add diversity to your online marketing campaigns and you’ll notice a steady stream of web traffic coming from multiple sources. Think of these strategies as long term commitments instead of short term campaigns. Measure, tweak and analyze to increase your conversions and build a successful website and thriving business.

Don’t just stop with SEO, add other online marketing activities to the mix. SEO is not being phased out, but being added to creating more well rounded online marketing efforts.

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Build your foundation first

Link building is one of the biggest determining factors for SEO performance. That being said, if your website is not properly optimized, link building can only carry you so far. Onsite optimization is almost like your steering wheel, directing the search engines on how to properly index your pages and which terms to rank you for. Links can be thought of as the gasoline that keeps your engine running and vehicle moving ahead. Onsite SEO guides and inbound links are the moving force.

An arms race

In my opinion, inbound links have become the new currency of the Internet. It’s like a virtual arms race between competing sites. Whoever has the most and best inbound links wins the top positions in the search engine rankings.

There are so many different ways to build inbound links. Link diversity is key. Quantity is key. Quality is key. There is so much going on. You want to match the links your competitors have. You want to find new inbound links that your competitors don’t have. There are high PR links, authority links, high traffic links, the list goes on and on.

The important thing to remember is to stay relevant online, your link building campaign should be an ongoing process not a one time thing. More and more companies are doing SEO. The minute you stop building fresh inbound links to your websites is the time when your competition leaps ahead of you.

Don’t be left behind. Make your link building campaign permanent and commit to it.

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Meet new people

Figured I’d state the obvious right off the bat. Networking online is a great way to meet new folks. The web allows you to chat with people you might have never met before. My network extends all over the world. It is interesting getting to know not only new people, the learning their culture as well. It’s funny when you start talking to others across the globe how much we all actually have in common. Now days, those involved in social media  have “real life friends” and “online friends.”

It is easy to find those with similar interests as well. For example, you can quickly seek out those in your industry or those that share the same hobbies as you. You can build a professional and personal networks online.

Reach higher influence in social networks

Success in social media has a lot to do with, well, being social. Being social allows you to make friends. As you might have noticed on many social networks, the more friends, the more influence. Now, I’m not saying it’s a shear numbers game, because it’s not. Just like anything in life, quality often trumps quantity. But if you can combine quality with quantity in your online network, you can achieve a high level of social media influence.

Find jobs easier

This is especially important due to the economy and competition of the job market. If you have searched for a job in the past couple years, you’ll notice that applying through a Monster.com and others is similar to buying a lottery ticket. You technically have a chance that an employer will contact you about the job, but in reality your resume is competing with hundreds if not thousands of others. Employers are often overwhelmed with the responses they get after posting a new position.

You can think of it a little like marketing. You can push yourself in front of people and hope someone is interested, or you can put yourself in places where others are looking for qualities that you offer, thus potentially increasing your chances for employment. There are powerful sites like LinkedIn that allow you to create comprehensive profiles that those interested can search and browse. I often receive job opportunities on LinkedIn even when I’m not looking for employment. Many recruiters and employers use sites like LinkedIn to find potential candidates as opposed to placing an ad. It is surely a base you should cover.

Learn

Since I’m active in social media, I rarely need to check my RSS feeds and definitely don’t have to watch the news anymore. I get all the information I need from Twitter, Facebook and Digg to name a few. From my experience, news travels much faster on social media than anywhere else I’ve seen. There have been multiple occasions when events happened and I receive my updates on Twitter MUCH faster than TV, radio and news websites were updating. Social media operates pretty much real time, so there is virtually no lag.

Many people you network with online are open and share their experiences with you. Everything from strategies they have learned, successes they’ve had and even failures they have learned from.

You can also learn by asking for feedback. You can throw ideas out to your network and receive valuable feedback that you might not have otherwise gotten.

Networking in general is powerful. Everything from joining your local Chamber of Commerce, interest groups as well as online. It is a good idea to have a live, local network as well as an extended online network. Online networking has become a necessity for many people and the opportunities gained are virtually limitless.

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But our ‘Social Media Scientist’ felt the need to scold me about it on Twitter.  Then he continued to take our back and forth public to all his Twitter friends.

Below are the Tweets from our chat.

The end where he takes a stab at us is the icing on the cake.

In all of Hubspot’s evangelism, I think they have started believing that they invented Internet Marketing.  No we were not the first to have a ‘website grader’,  as Dan points out.  But neither was Hubspot.

Here is a link to who was here first.
www.submitexpress.com (started 11 years ago)

We could provide more.

2:  Hit the “Join Today” button on the right.

3:  After you open your account. Start filling in all the info to set-up your account.

4:  Enter “social media guru” in the bio.

5:  Save and done!

…kidding of course!