According to Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Webmaster “A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s under-performing and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.”

Bounce Rate is Just a Number

You can easily get the Bounce Rate of your website or any landing page in your Google Analytics or any other analytics account you are using. However the number itself will never tell you what to do.

A high bounce rate on Campaign Landing pages could be considered fine but bad on your Website Home Page. Generally Bounce Rate anywhere less than 30% for complete website should be considered good, 30% – 50 % Average, 50-70% Needs Improvement & above 70% Bad.Besides Bounce Rate of Home Page or complete website, also consider individual pages.

According to Avinash Kaushik, the Ace Analytics Guru

• Bounce rate is a metric you’ll easily find in all web analytics tools.
• It is easy to understand, hard to misunderstand (something you can’t say for all, or even most, web analytics metrics).
• It is awesome at identifying low hanging fruit (you stress about so much, start here and you’ll easily find so much to action), try the above five tips first.
• Please don’t confuse bounce rate with exit rate, they are radically different metrics. Also: Everyone who comes to your site has to exit, almost no one who comes to your site needs to bounce!

Explanation:

Ideas
Awful idea = -1
Weak idea = 1
So-so idea = 5
Good idea = 10
Great idea = 15
Brilliant idea = 20

Execution
No execution = $1
Weak execution = $1000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.

The fastest growing kid – Google Plus

Google Plus is the fastest growing social networking website of recent times, by reaching 25 million users in just 16 days. Social Media giants like Facebook & Twitter took almost 3 years to reach those numbers. This makes marketers really excited even before Google Plus really launched the business Page option but will be released soon for public.

To clear up the picture for small businesses, Google Plus will come up with something for business in few months. However it is not pretty much clear how well it could compete with the primary competitor Facebook Pages & the custom tabs option. Facebook iFrames & Apps are already so deep in the marketers’ mind Google Plus has to do something beyond the expectations.

Google & Social Media – A boring story

Even though Google Plus is really appreciated by many but the Circles really make it complex on some occasions.  Google is well known for creating great tools like Gmail, Google Analytics and many more, however beyond youtube the social media space never witnessed too much success.

Small Business Google Plus Takeaway

• Don’t roll-up your sleeves but wait for Google Plus Business Pages to launch
• With not too much clarity of a solid approach let the leaders start first
• Take step by step approach, if it has some solid proposition to serve, worth to wait
• Links from Google plus are making a rage among SEO groups, so may be that is it

But today Internet provides enough opportunity to learn Small Business Marketing from experts at your own ease. Experts blog, tweet, bookmark and share their views and discussions every day to help the small businesses.

Here’s a  list of top 20 small business bloggers followed by a huge number of small business marketers. Frequent posts by these expert bloggers help marketers to learn latest trends, trick and techniques to improve small business marketing

1. Martin Zwilling

Blog: blog.startupprofessionals.com

Twitter Handle: @StartupPro

Twitter Followers: 348K

2. Chris Brogan

Blog: www.chrisbrogan.com

Twitter Handle: @chrisbrogan

Twitter Followers: 185K

3. Dan Schawbel

Blog: www.personalbrandingblog.com

Twitter Handle: @DanSchawbel

Twitter Followers: 118K

4. Carrie Wilkerson

Blog: www.blogbarefoot.com

Twitter Handle: @barefoot_exec

Twitter Followers: 104K

5. Brian Solis

Blog: www.briansolis.com

Twitter Handle: @briansolis

Twitter Followers: 95K

6. Liz Strauss

Blog: www.successful-blog.com

Twitter Handle: @lizstrauss

Twitter Followers: 81K

7. Bernadette Doyle

Blog: www.clientmagnetsblog.com

Twitter Handle: @bernadettedoyle

Twitter Followers: 77K

8. Anita Campbell

Blog: www.smallbiztrends.com

Twitter Handle: @smallbiztrends

Twitter Followers: 57K

9. John Jantsch

Blog: www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog

Twitter Handle: @ducttape

Twitter Followers: 52K

10. Dharmesh Shah

Blog: www.onstartups.com

Twitter Handle: @dharmesh

Twitter Followers: 51K

11. Lewis Howes

Blog: www.lewishowes.com

Twitter Handle: @LewisHowes

Twitter Followers: 43K

12. Jay Baer

Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com

Twitter Handle: @jaybaer

Twitter Followers: 39K

13. Melinda Emerson

Blog: www.succeedasyourownboss.com

Twitter Handle: @SmallBizLady

Twitter Followers: 38K

14. Michele Price

Blog: www.whoismicheleprice.com

Twitter Handle: @prosperitygal

Twitter Followers: 31K

15. Mitch Joel

Blog: www.twistimage.com/blog

Twitter Handle: @mitchjoel

Twitter Followers: 29K

16. Jonathan Fields

Blog: www.jonathanfields.com/blog

Twitter Handle: @jonathanfields

Twitter Followers: 29K

17. Danny Brown

Blog: www.dannybrown.me

Twitter Handle: @DannyBrown

Twitter Followers: 29K

18. Cori Padgett

Blog: www.biggirlbranding.com

Twitter Handle: @BigGirlBranding

Twitter Followers: 29K

19. Alexis Martin Neely

Blog: www.alexismartinneely.com

Twitter Handle: @AlexisNeely

Twitter Followers: 28K

20. Matthew Ringer

Blog: www.smallbizbee.com

Twitter Handle: @SmallBizBee

Twitter Followers: 20K

There is too much to do, bid right amount on each keyword, write killer ads, schedule campaigns for right time frame of each day and so on. So it might stop most of Small Business owners who usually take care of PPC Campaigns themselves to do what they are meant to, serve customers!

Today, I have four magical steps to automate your PPC campaign to get maximum of your money and you can give more time to your customers.

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1. Install Conversion Tracking

First thing first, as Google Analytics Tracking codes are very important to keep you updated about your websites performance, Adwords Conversion Tracking codes are equally for your PPC Campaign. This helps you give a straight forward report of performance of your PPC campaign.

You should install the conversion tracking code on the page just coming after someone fills up a form or after customer completes order process on your website, mostly known as “Thank You page.” This will also help you to keep all the data at one place and easy to keep track of your cost per conversion, as it will show up on the PPC Dashboard every time you visit.

To Install: Go to Google Adwords Account – > Reporting & Tools Tab -> Conversions -> Create New Conversion -> Save & Get Codes – > Install on Thank You Page

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2. Choose Automatic Bidding for maximum Clicks

Enabling automatic bidding for your PPC Campaign the Google AdWords system tries to bring you the most possible clicks within your budget. Adwords system automatically chooses bids that will earn you the most clicks.

For SMB advertisers it is best to leave the CPC bid limit option unchecked, which makes sure that Google Adwords will set a bid for you, what finally help you maximize your revenue taking all relevant data in account.

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3. Choose Enhanced CPC for maximum Conversion

Enhanced CPC option automatically adjusts your Maximum CPC bid for keywords for each bidding to get more conversions while maintaining your current CPA. However it is suggested, a click could cost up to 30% more than your usual bid.

To Activate: Go to Google Adwords Account -> Settings Tab of your campaign – > Bidding and budget section – > Bidding Option

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4. Schedule Ads for maximum Conversions

Choosing ad rotation for maximum conversion, Adwords system shows your ads more often which are expected to provide more conversions. If there is insufficient conversion data, the system will optimize for more clicks.

To Activate: Go to Google Adwords Account -> Settings Tab of your campaign – > Advanced settings section -> Ad Rotation Option

Today people spend more time surfing for things on Internet than actually using it. Googling (read as searching on google.com) the desired product, exploring brand websites reading reviews and re-checking over social media is the real deal these days. This creates too much friction for users. At most as marketers, it’s our responsibility to help visitors sail through websites in an effortless way.

Visual Call-to-Action to Through Some Light

Visual Call-to-Action plays an important part in website design basics for small business. For such matter, I personally love online travel booking websites. They always utilized the visual navigation to create an ongoing engagement in every step of transaction.

• Visual Call-to-Action are best at improving website user experience
• Visual Call-to-Action make sure the user knows what to do next
• Visual Call-to-Action also gives you an option to create clear pathway to transaction
• All this finally means higher transaction or goal completion rate and less dropouts

Every Blind Turn Needs the Signage

To be very precised, for your website visitors every page is a blind turn. They are not sure what should be the next move? Your website “Home Page” is the real test, people want to see some visually appealing signage to take them somewhere they want. Then Individual Product Pages also face the same test.

Visual Call-to-Actions prevent your website visitors to reach dead-ends in your website. Which is definitely you don’t want at any time, because people hate dead-ends in websites and prefer to leave them than to do voluntary efforts to do something else.

Internet Marketing has seen many ups and downs in past two years. Google introduced too many new algos to refine the results. Yahoo started showing results from Bing, good for them. I over heard somewhere “Google believes every result should be best for the end user” so are they just trying to find a silver bullet for the best results? Good for us!!

Google and Facebook, What’s the connection?

Well, I am not going to establish any real relations between Facebook, Twitter or any other social media website with Google and search engines. My advise is very simple for Small Business Internet Marketers, Search Engines love Social Media. Which means Search Engines will consider all social share signals important ranking websites.

we love being social

A recent data by SEOMoz reveals Search Engine Experts consider Social Share data important in 2011. At the same time this is also not to be ruled out that volume of backlinks will give a way to quality of backlinks to any website.

Facebook and Customers, What’s the connection?

The reach and influence of Facebook or social media is not to be ignored at any cost today. People share content with their friends, family and professional network too, if they love it. This creates opportunity to influence buying decision, you got it! People prefer recommendations while they are buying only from their trusted ones.

Will Facebook really dominate?

It’s still early days to say Facebook will dominate or not. But for sure social media is about to rule. Which means if you are a Small Business and planning your Internet Marketing for 2011, do you know what to do?

1. Creating useful blogs / podcasts / content that people love to share on their network
2. Making a website that helps to share content (adding share buttons, lol)
3. Giving more importance to Social Media in Internet Marketing Spend for 2011

You heard it right; we are talking about Online Banner Ads for small business today. Banner Ads were one of the first tools in Internet Marketing to create some waves. Banner Ads could still add a great flavor to your Internet Marketing today, because it’s cheap.

If you are hearing too much about Banner Advertising being almost dead, you need a coffee! A well planned and executed Banner Ad campaign can still be worthy to attract good visitors to your website and convert them into customers. Let’s rock and roll.

1.       Nicely Designed Banner Ads

An attractive and engaging design is the most important part of your Banner Ad Campaigns. The Internet users are so smart today that need something smart to catch their attention, not too cheesy, mind it. It should have all major ingredients like attention grabbing, engaging and call-to-action (my favorite).

Introduction of Rich Media in Display Advertising really came as a boon. Now you have so many opportunities to create amazing looking Web Ads. I advise Small Business owners or marketing heads not to try their hands designing your ads or using free tools until you are a pro, because a lousy looking Web Ad could really blow off on your face.

2.       Carefully Planned Campaigns

Most of the Ad Networks provide good tools to plan your campaigns effectively. You can target & re-target your audience effectively. Reaching right audience is right because you don’t time chasing not interested customers. It will take you some time to get hang of different tools available with ad networks but they are worth to try. At the same time keep testing different adjustments to get the best combination.

3.       Targeted Landing Pages

I was never in favor of taking every single visitor to home page of website. A well designed Landing page helps to support the purpose of your banner advertising. You need to understand if you are running a Banner Ad for “Cheap London Hotels” that should never take visitors to a generic home page; it should directly land to “Cheap London Hotels Page.” Which means that page should have enough and right information about cheap hotels in London and some option to make a booking.

4.       Strategic Result Analysis

Now that seems to be quite a big word here. Perhaps you need some way to measure the results. You should observe how many goals you were able to complete from a particular campaign. Goals could vary from business to business. It could be inquiries, sales, sample requests or anything that you want ultimately your visitors to do.

Facebook is all set to say goodbye to the most cherished FBML mantra by small businesses already. All new pages won’t be able to add magical static FBML tabs and old pages are advised to migrate into iFrame & Facebook Apps.

“Holly Cow! What the hell is this iFrame now?” A startup recently asked me in a seminar. I said don’t worry its here to make things slightly complicated but interesting.

If you are still wondering why everyone around you is so much worried about FBML being not around, let me explain. Static FBML Tabs were used to create amazing looking customized landing pages on Facebook Pages for business. They were free and very easy to use. A basic knowledge of HTML was enough to create a Facebook Landing Page to give exciting experience to your customers.

Life after Static FBML

Static FBML is replaced by iFrame and Facebook Apps. However Facebook Apps are not quite new to the online marketing society. Many marketers used it at best in various ways for large businesses. But now small businesses are forced to take a nose dive. You have to take the App way to get custom landing pages now.

custom facebook landing pages look great

iFrame & Facebook Apps: Just what a Small Business must know about it?

iFrame basically means showing one webpage on other using some kind of frame. The same rules will be followed.

1. You have to create a webpage or a microsite specially for your Facebook Page
2. You have to place it on remote server, like on your website itself
3. Width of that page should be between 500-520 px, very important
4. You have to register a Facebook App on Facebook App Center, Free for now!
5. You have to pull your microsite for Facebook on that App
6. You have to add that App into your Facebook Page as a Tab
7. Make that Tab as default Landing page

It was easy, right? Not really. Well all this requires advance knowledge of HTML and other weird languages, lol. And as a small business marketer you are not suppose to learn it, I agree. So you have two ways now, one outsource your Facebook Page Designing or Free Facebook Apps, like one by Involver.

Most of our online marketing campaigns don’t fail because of bad outbound activities, like PPC Ads or Banner Ads. Is it true???  But most of our online marketing campaigns fail because of bad campaign Landing Pages.

According to research by Marketing Sherpa you can maximize your lead capturing up to 4% of total traffic to any landing page. Unfortunately only 2% of landing pages are seriously optimized and 98% fail dramatically.

Continuing our series of optimizing landing pages

1. Mathematics of PPC Landing Pages for Small Businesses

2. Rocket Science of PPC Landing Page Design

Now we will discuss five biggest mistakes you can avoid to increase your leads &bottom line finally.

1. Too Much Copy

Many marketers still believe too much text copy helps to impress customers. However we noticed that too much text placed in any PPC Landing Page is the biggest anxiety or distraction against your goal.

There should only be enough copy to explain value proposition of your products & incentives you offer.

2. Usual Navigation Bar

If there are more than 3 outgoing links present in any landing page, chances are very low that you will achieve a higher goal conversion. People may get excited to click on the links & the intensity towards your product may get down.

You have to understand the landing pages are not just another page of your website.

3. Weak Call-to-Action

Call-to-Action buttons saying “Buy Now” or “Order Now” are best to get most out of your landing pages. A weak call to action like “Know More” or “Learn More” is almost neglected by many prospect customer today.

Make sure you motivate your future customers to do what you want them to do!

4. Big Forms

Bigger & Scary forms are impossible to cross by customers. A big form is an obstacle that increases the anxiety level of your future customers. It stops them to complete the goals you want them to complete. People prefer simple and short forms.

You can always ask for more details from customers during the sales cycle.

5. Unrelated Visuals

Last but never the least; images within your PPC Landing Pages are the biggest emotional-contact factor. Most of the time people won’t even read out the complete copy but they give detailed attention to images for sure!

You can easily connect with your customers using related images, pictures or other visuals.

Avoid these 5 mistakes in your landing pages to get the maximum ROI out of your time effort & money.

We will agree, landing page design is very critical for success of any online marketing campaign. To start with, designing PPC landing page is not as difficult as Rocket Science, but to be precise, not easy either.

Following any marketing activity, your customers reach campaign landing pages, and this is the only moment to impress your future customers or existing customers. This also gives an opportunity to help them make a buying decision without wasting too much time.

On the last post – Mathematics of PPC Landing Page – we discussed few chief components of a perfect landing page.

Let’s revise:

1. There should be enough motivational factors to complete a desired goal

2. Value proposition or complete information of the product to be listed carefully to strengthen your pitch

3. Incentives are also required to make customers feel valued

4. Anxiety needs to be minimized at maximum to make it easier for customers

Now we will discuss about the design elements of a perfect landing page design.

A. Attention Grabbing Visual

An attention grabbing image or picture starts the journey of an amazing PPC landing page . Visuals help to connect emotionally with future customers.

B. Compelling Copy – Part I

Compelling text copy needs to summarize the value proposition and incentives on offer for your customers.

C. Compelling Copy – Part II

Text copy to add more power to your product, like customer testimonials or safe shopping assurance will also help your cause.

D. Goal Completion Form

A small form to capture the initial interest of future customers is the final component of your PPC landing page design.

Now you understand the PPC landing page is really not a Rocket science but just an art!!!

Happy New Year to all the readers. 2010, what a year that was! We saw so many changing trends around Internet Marketing that made us optimistic enough to put more dollars and dive more deeper.

Let’s start our topic for the day understanding the mathematics of PPC Landing Pages. When we discussed PPC for Small Business in one of our previous post, we figured out the importance of Landing Page, deciding fate of your PPC campaign. I will also add that Landing Pages are equally important for all other targeted campaigns, like, Email Marketing or Social Media Campaigns.

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Why Landing Pages are so critically important for PPC Campaigns?

• Segment the quality visits by capturing them into lead formats
• The leads generation rate will directly show the success of your PPC Campaign
• As huge money is always involved; Return on Investment is also in questioned
• Ultimately you will see increase in bottom line by targeted pages than usual product pages in your website

Mathematics of PPC Landing Pages

I recommend PPC Landing Pages are similar to a mathematical equation. There is a strange formula to reach the desired goals from every landing page.

G = {M + V + I – A}

Where G = Goals to be completed

M = Motivational Call-to-Actions

V = Value Proposition of the product

I = Incentives with the product

A = Anxiety created by the Landing Page

To complete more goals from your PPC Landing Page you should plan and state the motivational Call-to-Actions precisely along with Value Proposition & Incentives you serve. This will reduce the anxiety of future customer to reach you.

Motivational Elements: Test used to motivate future customers to complete the goal. Like, Buy Now, Download Now or Ask Free Consultation.

Value Proposition: The features of your product that make it different from competitors. Like, Quick Delivery or Low Prices.

Incentives: Freebies, Gift Vouchers, Discount Coupons or Free Samples

Anxiety: The difficulty level customers may face to approach you with the appearance of your Landing Page. Anxiety could also be created by too much text or form field on the page.

Understanding life cycle of search marketing is also important for every small business owner, because you are the person most of the time, handling or managing the SEO & PPC activities.

Understanding process of search marketing is however quite easy, even just a cakewalk! It could be separated in three main steps.

1.       Research

2.       Implementation

3.       Analysis

Now other important aspects to understand the search marketing life cycle are:

1.        Man-hours required VS Timeline

2.       ROI VS Timeline

Initial few months of search marketing, including SEO & PPC campaigns will require bigger efforts than coming ones. You will notice efforts required going down as the time progress. This will provide you opportunities to try other online marketing activities like Email Marketing or Social Media Marketing.

While we consider a gradual decline for the efforts required in Search Marketing for Small Business. You will notice complete otherwise trends for ROI. The number of orders or conversions you receive will defiantly shoot up along with time.

Happy Search Marketing

At every phase of your Search Marketing Life Cycle it is advised to keep a strict eye at efforts VS ROI. This will help you to revise strategies and develop a formidable Online Marketing Plan for your Small Business!

We keep talking about social media marketing for small businesses at different platforms these days. There are so many blogs or resources discussing Facebook Marketing for Small Business, Twitter Marketing for Small Business, LinkedIn Marketing for Small business or any other way to use social media for targeting your customers.

Most of the Small and Medium Businesses are quite unsure about jumping into it yet. Even though we all agree that it may help, but not sure how to measure it because there are so many conversations happening at the same time.

Measuring your social media marketing activities could turn to be catching an unchained monkey. First of all you should consider that it may not include direct dollars spent but time and resources will still be charged. Most of the activities like creating a Blog, Facebook Page, Twitter Page, LinkedIn Profile and Youtube Channel are also free. But you still have to write pay-checks for people working on them. So exactly what will be the touch-stone to measure social media marketing for small business?

You can use these factors to see Value it brings to your business by following modes

• Value it brings to improve your products by observing customer comments or updates
• Value it brings to improve customer service & reduce cost on it
• Value it brings to engage potential customers and existing ones to get repeated orders
• Value it brings to make you and your company as Subject Matter Expert in industry & niche
• Value it brings to enhance Positive Sentiment about your brand over internet
• Value it brings to save your brand by listening to unfavorable conversations

Now all these factors are such volatile in nature that it may take you few months even year to actually scale it down. There are so many paid tools available to help you like Radian6, Sysomos, Attensity 360 or Alterian SM2 and they will cost you $50 to $600 every month. But I am in favour of using free tools to sharpen you social media marketing skills. Free Social Media Monitoring tool like Social Mention is good enough to start your roller costar ride.

Using Social Mention you can observe few very important things to enhance your brand’s social media presence:

• How many people are actually talking about your brand on internet?
• What are the chances they talk repeatedly?
• What is the sentiment, either positive or negative about your brand?
• Top users and sources of discussions
• List of the pages of actual conversation about your business and brand

enjoy the social media by measuring it!

Make sure that you consider every observation about your brand as an opportunity to improve your products or customer service. Because social media is all about being social with your customers and you will catch the unchained monkey of social media.

• One – Viral Marketing is not a campaign
• Second – You can’t plan or force something to go viral
• Third – It’s an act of understanding pain points of your target market

There are many things that can help your marketing efforts go viral.

Videos & Pictures

Ebooks & Handbooks

• Blog Posts
• Free Gifts
• Anything else? It’s upto you

1. Add enough Passion to what you do

Most have you have chosen a profession that you were most passionate about, not sure? If not then it’s time to turn passionate about everything you do to market your business. Be passionate about new content you create to reach your potential customers. Think of how effectively you can serve your customers every day with not only products but content as well.

2. Add some Purpose to taste

Creating new and wonderful content is the necessity of a viral campaign. But producing piece of scrap everyday is just waste of time. What is Purpose to taste?

• Entertain your customers
• Educate your customers or
• Educate & Entertain at the same time

Your content should be around pain points of your customers so they can easily relate and share with friends and family a well.

3. Add Care of Sharing

I always advice startups & SMBs that viral starts from all of us. How? We see so many viral videos shared by all of our friends on Facebook every morning. So someone must have shared at the first time so it came to notice of few and they also share it, then it went viral. So if you create wonderful content, you should also share it in all possible social networks, bookmarks and even mail it to your friends.

4. Add Creativity but avoid Faking

Consumers of today are very smart, no doubt. Along with Internet’s strong information flowing character, your customers are equipped to compare you & competitors in a flash. To stand out or to be outstanding you need to do something that was never done before. Try to add creativity but avoid faking with your company’s values or standing in the market to make a long lasting relation with customers.

Add all these ingredients carefully in your Marketing Campaigns and watch them go Viral!!!!

Being the most consumer friendly media and the cutting edge technologies involved with Internet can shape any company’s Marketing-Mix dramatically. In past few years we witnessed some amazing changes in Internet Marketing and the year 2011 seems to be quite stunning as well. Recently in a brief conversation with a young entrepreneur, I discussed Internet Marketing trends for 2011 to watch for. Here are the trends for you:

1. Search is Full, Rich & Dynamic

Both the major search engines, Google & Bing started including results from social media, video, pictures & news along with basic web pages. Search Engines also started showing up screenshot for results. “Google Instant” the most awaited version is quite impressive too. Now your customers will have so many results or options at their disposal. Effects of all these variations are still to be evaluated but I consider you need to move fast for your Search Marketing strategy.

2. Online Videos are new Display ads

With search & social media dominating the internet in last few years, pundits started considering online Display ads as obsolete. However no one noticed the growth of Rich Media & Online Videos recently. Most of the online videos running on free media space like Youtube Videos were actually part of online advertising, were display and had viral effect all over. It should be considered as a transformation for good.

3. Social Media will influence Buying Decisions

Facebook alone recorded users spending more time on it than Google on many occasions in 2009 & 2010. This means consumers spend handful of time on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtbe, LinkedIn and many others. People create & share content, rate products and do so much, that will for sure influence businesses in coming years.

All major social networks are trying to gel-up with businesses by proving Business Pages. This will help brands to directly engage customers on Internet. This should be taken seriously by small businesses because it will certainly influence buying decisions by a margin.

4. Email Marketing will make content the King again

Marketing was always revolved around quality content. In 2011 Email Marketing will never be just an online flyer mailed to strangers, that I always advised!  Email Marketing will act as a handy resource for customers & future customers and will need lot of quality content to make it large.

5. Web Apps / Applications can change the game

According to a recent report local business information based web properties like Foursquare and Yelp are underutilized and constitute only 1% share of Internet usage.  But coming years will see huge push from Web Applications/Apps & APIs (Application Program Interface) to tailor local content for consumers along with these websites. Amazing features like social connect, smart suggest, user reviews and discussion about any product among social networks will make Web Apps a cutting technology product. Ability to put together basic web, social media, RSS & news at the ease of consumers can surely change the game of Internet Marketing in 2011.

We saw Email marketing changing dramatically in last few years. People considered it an online promo flyer at one time. In last couple of years it became a source to educate customers via Email Newsletters and had huge impact over Web Strategy of all major brands.

What an effective Email Marketing for Small Business has to offer?

email marketing is a gift

• Higher Customer Engagement through periodic Online Newsletters
• Brand Establishment as Subject Matter Expert in Industry & Niche
• Driving Traffic to Website, Blog, Promotional Pages and Social Media accounts
• Effective Lead Nurturing
• Of course you will be alive in your customer’s mind

Two Decisive Question of Email marketing

Now you know Email Marketing is more than just an online Flyer mailed to thousands of strangers. If it serves some purpose to readers, they will cherish it, simple! Whenever customers or future customers receive your Email or Newsletter or an edition of Email Campaign they have only two questions in mind:

• Do I know you? (From or Senders Name)
• Do I Care? (Subject & Content)

Answers of these two questions will decide effectiveness of your Email Marketing. Let’s simplify the two basic questions to strengthen your Email Marketing Strategy.

email-campaign-subscribe

Step 1. Creating Email List

Email Lead List needs careful implementation and execution. Strangers don’t want to see your Email in their Inbox and you don’t want to waste your resources on them either. Collect names wisely. Start collecting Emails at each customer contact point. Use Email Newsletter subscription form at website, Billing Counter, Bills, Invoices or Direct Mailers. Don’t forget to add “Free Offers”, “Free Download”, “Complimentary Trail Pack” and “Discount” words for new subscription, they travel a lot!

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Step 2. Creating Engaging Content

Taking care of the second question will be quite easy for us now. How? Use your existing Blog! While your blog is generating new and interesting content for your niche every week, you can send that content directly with some nice packaging of offers to the customers.

email template - start engaging

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How to Automate Email Marketing Campaign? Email Marketing Softwares are here!!

Now it seems to be you are all set to start an Email Campaign. The names are few but good to go for now. Well what about the Email Marketing Software? No money? Don’t worry, we already have solution for you. There are so many Online Email Marketing Softwares available to help you. Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, iContact and Benchmark are few names to start Small Business Email Marketing Campaigns. There are many exciting free trial offers available to jump start your Email Campaign.

Using these online Email Marketing softwares you can start an automatic Email campaign that is driven from your Blog RSS feeds or just atom feeds.

Lets start Emailing

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Test Test Test!

With every Email try to test few things here and there to get the maximum from your Email marketing efforts.  You can Change subject, colours, language, images and styling to see how people react to them. What are the most important things to lookout for?

• Open Rate: How many Emails are opened?
• Click rate: How many people actually click to links provided?
• Unsubscribes: How many readers unsubscribe?

If you believe the quality of products alone could help you hold the customers, your marketing team is not thinking out-of-box.  The most probable reason according to intense research is “Small Business act dead.” Acting dead? Yes, customers don’t even remember your brand after few days and look-out for new provider if needed that service again, if you don’t act alive.

dont act bored, have fun!

What’s next? How to be alive in customers mind? The answer is “Engaging customers with Blog.” Now you might say: I don’t have time, resource, good content and so many other reasons, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving it a shot!! The way Internet has evolved over a course of just few years; customers want to see stories, reviews, tips & tricks or any content with a human touch.  Traditional Media was about all corporate colours, but Digital Medium including Internet turned things upside-down.

but why to blog?

Why to blog?

• Helps to establish your niche in the industry
• Create opportunity to capture new leads
• Engage customers and helps retargeting
• Increase your SEO without extra efforts
• Develops thought leadership in organization, so many people can contribute from different departments

blogging and lead generation

What are Blogging Best Practices?

• Discuss wide range of topics within industry
• Discuss about your niche
• Provide Tips, Tricks, How to dos
• Write reviews of products available in industry
• Analyze Latest Trends & News
• Once to twice every week is good to start, keep the pace uniform
• Don’t directly sell your products or services
• Just try to create interest in your products by discussing Pain-Points of target market
• Comment on related blogs
• Provide link to your blog on other blogs, only if you have something nice to share
• Bookmark your blog posts on all major online bookmarking websites (Digg, Stumble-upon, Google Bookmarks)
• Share new posts on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn also

How to setup a Blog?

• Setup blog in your website, avoid blogspot or any 3^rd party website (you want blog to help your SEO efforts not anyone else)
• Get a sub-domain in your website that is related to industry (like,  travel.myhotel.com)
• Free blogging softwares like WordPress are easy to install and good to start
• Customize blog to your websites theme, take professional help if required. It helps a great deal trust me

blogging is so interesting

Now when you start posting new updates on your blog you have chances to be alive in your customers mind. We will discuss to use Email Marketing on the next post and elevating the engagement to next level. Till then Happy Blogging!!

It’s like inviting your clients or prospects for a party at home. Beware you can’t bill them after the party gets over. That means you can just show them what you have but not sell them right away. So for my readers, I though to do a questionnaire about “Social Media Marketing for Small Business.”

What is Social Media Marketing?

There’s no need to discuss the growth of Internet & Social Media in recent years now. We all will accept and few studies also revealed, that we spend a huge time, almost 80% of free time, surfing the internet.

Social Media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn collectively consume the largest share of Internet consumption. The reasons and ways could be different by different users, either for connecting with friends, watching videos or even for professional. But for sure it plays a huge role in our life today.

But why Social Media is best for marketing?

The Social Media platform is so much consumed that marketers also realized its potential impact on their brands. If brands want or not, someone is talking over Social Media about their product. Now being ignorant won’t help. Brands and marketers have to be among their customers to keep a close watch.

Considering its friendly approach and reach, Social Media is one of the best if not the best marketing tool available today for Small Business & startups. While giant businesses are still fighting to save their brand being spammed, Small Businesses and Startups can confirm their Subject-Matter-Expertise.

What Makes Social media different?

All conventional mediums to reach customers or target market are not much effective today, if they are not completely obsolete on few levels. Screaming hoardings, loud FM commercials or pinching TV ads are bound to be ignored, not really? Do you pay any attention to them these days? If your answer is yes, don’t read further

The Up-side Down Marketing with Social Media

I am still not in favor of taking all conventional marketing mediums away, but Social Media really makes marketers and consumers feel different. Youtube videos (now used to launch complete ad campaigns) are played and paused at free will of the user. Facebook commercials or Twitter updates are consumed very easily, internet users don’t even switch websites to avoid them.

“Social Media is more Social than Marketing”

DIY Guide of Social Media Marketing for Small Business

I always talk about marketing as an art to help customers and not all about making money, OK, yes I do know money is also important. Social Media gives that platform to your marketing approach to help customers all the time.

social media is fun

Bonus Tips

Twitter for Small Business

LinkedIn for Small Business

Facebook for Small Business

Internet is one of the most influencing media these days for every small business. With website you should always aim to create a long lasting impression on your customers & prospects.

small business website design ideas

10 things to remember before you start designing a website for your small business:

1. Customer Focus – Pain Point

Your website should always be focused on your customers. Your customers always visit your website to get some kind of help. Make an informal research on different pain points of your customers. Always make sure your plan website to help customers resolve those pain points. Every aspect of your website going forward should be around your customers only.

2. Navigation & Information Structure

Make the Navigation of your website easy to understand and walk-through. Important Pages like “Products / Categories, Portfolio, Clients & Locations” should be highlighted. Pages like “About Us & Contact Us” can take backseat.

website-navigation

The way information flow within your website is also important. All of your products should be categorized first. If you have 25 products, you can’t put them all on your homepage. But to make it easier for customers, categorize them. Put all categories on the navigation. You can also segment navigation into two parts – Prominent and Less Prominent.

3. Colors & Images

Colors & Images are very important to make any website attractive. A Picture express more than many words. Colors help to highlight certain aspect of a big paragraph. Make sure all pictures are fresh, if possible put pictures of your real customers & staff. However at any cost try to keep colors & pictures that best represent your target market.

4. Text Copy

Adding good volume of fresh and unique text copy helps a great deal. First it helps search engines to understand the motive of your website (because they only read text, lol). Second it helps your customers to develop some faith on your products. Try to write the text in a language that is friendly for your target market.

5. Flash or not to Flash?

Recently Google make it public that flash animations are most welcome. Flash animations will help to make your website attractive, that doesn’t mean you should place flash all over. Flash animations make your website heavy, so keep the use to minimum. Wherever possible use as much as text within the flash animation file.

6. Load Time

While your design team was pretty busy to make attractive and highly dynamic website, they used so many scripts. Now it takes a whole life to load, oh god!!!!!! Try to use as minimum scripts and heavy coding on webpages so they can load fast, because no one prefer to wait!!!!!

7. Compelling Offers & Call-to-Action

If I ask you – What are your compelling offers? I know every Small Business will say – All of my products are compelling.

compelling-offers-ebay

And I will say you are completely wrong!!! Today customers think basic products are boring. They want discounts, free goodies, free subscription, free home delivery and so many other frees. Try to create some offers for every season, festival, even for weekends too. Now add some call-to-action banners & boxes within your website, across all pages to get more millage of every compelling offer.

8. Portfolio & Clients

Make sure to include your portfolio, List of clients & Client Testimonials in your website. Potential customers will be glad to see what you have already achieved.

9. SEO

As Small Business Search Engine Optimization is very important for your website. It will help you to achieve more targeted customers and reduce the cost to acquire new visitors to your website. You could be spending some money on Web Banner Ads, online advertising or Pay-per-click campaigns now, but SEO will help you in a longer run. Know more about SEO for Small Business

10. Be Creative & Be Simple

You should always look-up to the industry leaders for the trends. But make sure you add your own creativity for your website. It will be an opportunity to show your own style of working. It will also be a good time to flaunt your niche in the industry.

small business website design

Be creative but be simple, because simplicity is the best policy

I talk to so many people every day and they want to use Twitter in an effective way for marketing. Using Twitter to serve a great purpose for your small business is not a rocket science too. Let’s see what twitter can do for your business?

-          Help you to establish a brand within target market

-          Help you to show subject matter expertise in the industry

-          Help you to reach customers any time

-          Help you understand your customers more accurately

-          Help you to use it as customer service tool as well

-          Help you to promote new events & products (don’t overdo it, lol)

Bonus Tip

A. 10 Innovative Ways to Use Twitter For Business

Now we will discuss 5 important and very basic steps that you could follow to reach your customers effectively.

1. Handle

Choose your Twitter user-name carefully. It helps your customers to identify who are you? You can always use name of your business as the username. If possible try to add important words of your services also. For example your company name is “Company” and you are in Travel, then try to get a handle @company-travels

2. Background Image

The background image of your Twitter profile reflects your true identity. Twitter allows background image & profile colors to be edited. Make it more similar to your website.

Some samples: Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices

3. Follows & Lists

It is very important that you follow your industry leaders & popular brands. This will give an opportunity to make excellent conversation. Following anyone on twitter is pretty easy. However creating lists is more useful. Create few lists for different categories in your industry. By creating a list you actually don’t follow the user but whenever you visit that particular list, you can see all updates from included users in that list.

Bonus Tip

B. Learn more about Twitter Lists

4. Conversations

Please consider Twitter as a Social Media Tool and not as Google PPC where you can start advertising from the word go!!! Twitter should be used to listen before you talk (oops tweet). Search for tweets related to your industry or products first, figure-out how you can contribute and then give an effective solution. But remember -

Be regular &

Be Useful, always!

Bonus Tip

C. Seven Habits of Highly Effective Twitter Users

5. Promotions

Promote your Twitter account over your Website, Email signature, Facebook page and even your Print-Marketing materials.

twitter-for-business

Now you should be ready to pay for every visit you receive through search engines. This might be slightly different from traditional mediums where you pay for impressions or a time-bound fee.

To advertise on major search engines you just need to pay money and you get visitors. However till the time you don’t understand it properly you won’t get quality visitors.

You can go ahead and create accounts on these 3 major platforms; Google is most popular by far.

• Google Adwords
• Bing / Microsoft Ad Center
• Yahoo Search Marketing

PPC Structure

ppc-ad-structure

1. Ad Campaign – To start with the PPC Marketing you have to create a campaign. Create a campaign by setting up your budget for every day. It will be very important to figure out your objective before starting your new PPC campaign. This will help you to go ahead and create an effective search marketing strategy.

2. Ad Group – Create an Ad Group keeping all similar products together. If one of your products is entirely different from other then create different ad groups. For example Jasmine & Rose could be considered just flowers but they are completely different for a customer. So create different ad groups for different flowers J

3. Keywords – Now that your campaigns and ad groups are placed properly in themes. It’s time to look for right keywords for each ad group. You can use keyword tools provided in your account. Try to find the high search volume keywords but make sure of relevancy to your products. Relevancy is the key to success in PPC.

Don’t forget to develop a list of negative keywords also. Many people search to do some research and few actually to buy. It is important to figure out keywords that are not relevant for you. Like you don’t have any free offers or tutorials in your product list, better you add these keywords as negative. But if you have only free downloads and tutorials than ‘high quality’ will be a negative word for you.

4. Ads – This will be the most difficult part. You have to write ads that will show up when people search for your selected keywords. Try to make a search like a customer and figure out what other competitors have written. Now try to add some freshness in your ads. Because this is first chance to stand-out among the competitors.

Bonus Tip

A. Use keyword insertion while writing an ad. So whenever someone search for your keyword the ad will also include that keyword. This will be best to show your relevance to customers. For example

Best {Keyword} Services

Execellent Redecoration &

Redesign. Staring at $500!!

www.mywebsite.com/redecoration

B. Use custom display url, the actual url is different from display url for ads so make sure to add theme keyword for ads.

5. Landing Page – landing pages are actually the page where your customers will reach just after clicking your ad. So it’s better to send different customers to particular landing pages so they don’t waste time search for your products. You can tailor pages for different products and campaigns you are running. This will help you to show that you already understand what customers are looking for.

Bonus Tip

landing pages & call-to-action

C. Call to Action – Create your pages with 2 call to actions. Because some customers are ready to buy and others need time. For first use compelling text, images and buttons to Buy your product. For second ones you can create offers to serve some purpose, for example

• free consultation
• free e-book download or
• offer newsletters

D. Scheduling – Try to schedule your campaign for particular cities, states and even for particular time of day, weekdays or even only on weekends. This should be done considering how your preferred customers will search on internet.

E. Test, Test & Test – Keep testing all elements of your PPC Campaign. Keywords, ads, scheduling, Landing pages by keeping eye on your results. You can also use few measures like:

• CTR (Click Through rate) – Clicks to Total impressions, don’t look to set a parameter for CTR for keywords and ads but try to increase as much by stopping low performing ones.

• Bounce Rate – How many visitors leave your landing pages without visiting any other page vs total visit on that page.

• Conversion or sales – Overall success of your PPC Campaign depends on numbers of conversions or sales or any other goals you set. Try to analyze every element on that parameter and try to optimize the whole campaign.

Here we are completing our series on Search Marketing for Small Business. However there’s always some space for improvement, I will keep writing to help you achieve most out of your Internet Marketing.

Before going forward let’s review our on-Page SEO work through these free tools:

• Online SEO Tool by SEO Workers
• Website Grader by Hubspot
• Search Engine Robots Analyze by Submit Express

All these tools could give you some outline of the on page optimization work, however they might contradict each other on few occasions but its fine for the moment.

Bonus Tips

A. Search Engine Submission – Before starting link building, submit your website to major search engines through Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site-Explorer, Bing Webmaster

You can submit a XML format sitemap on these platforms. To create XML Sitemap you can use online sitemap generators and upload sitemap.xml file in your root directory. (www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml)

• XML Sitemap Generator
• SitemapDoc

B. Robots.txt implementation – Robots.txt files are the simple text files placed in the root directory of your website (www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt), to show search engines which folders are for public view and which are not. You can restrict search engines to access particular folders in your websites such as customer documents, personal information and financial information.

-          Learn more about Robots.txt implementation at The Web Robots Pages

link lets people find you!!

What is Link Building?

Link building is to attract quality and relevant links from different websites. This helps to increase the online presence of your website. Anyways you need different roads to lead to your business if you want more customers and less bottle neck situations, lol.

“All major search engines value a website higher, which has more number of quality back links or inbound links among all competitors.”

Important Factors of Link Building

1. Anchor Text – The clickable linking text which appears on the any webpage and connects to your website. It helps visitors to understand what they will get following this particular link. Make sure you use all your preferred keywords randomly on all backlinks wherever possible.
2. Link Relevancy – You should get backlinks from all the relevant websites to your website. For example if you have a hotel website the relevant website will be a travel news, travel guide or tourism website and not electric equipment or hardware websites.
3. Link Popularity – Number of backlinks you achieve for your website is also important, more you receive more visits you will get and it will be easy to find your website.  
4. Link Distribution – Distribute your backlinks properly to all important pages, like different product pages should also get direct backlinks from different websites.
5. Avoid Spamming – I always advise Small Business to consider internet marketing as an art. If in link building process you get all links from one source, one anchor text or to only one page it will be the worst design. So distribute your colors all over and equally.

Link Building for Small Business

Link Building for Small Business is very important to attract more visitors to your website from different sources besides search engines. However relevancy factor we discussed above is very very important here. Because you don’t want people to visit your website without any real purpose to solve. So make sure to consider relevancy of the visitors you will get from any website, before even trying to get backlink.

1. Directory Submission – Besides local print business directories, you should also submit your website to online directories. People do search for services in their neighborhood in local web directories. Also submit your website to business directories related to your industry and niche category, most of them are free. Just add to relevant ones because most of the directories don’t even submit your website if you go for free submission and if you are paying money you should be precised. Important ones will be following two (paid)

• Yahoo Directory
• Business.com

2. Blogging – Create a blog within your website with the help of free blogging software. WordPress is best and simple. Most of the website hosting providers also provide WordPress within the control panel, where you can easily install it. Otherwise you can download latest version from wordpress.org and follow instructions provided.

link building for small business

Bonus Tips:

c. Best Blogging Practices for small Business

-          Create a subdomain to start your blog. Avoid blog.myhotel.com but travel.myhotel.com or fashion.bestbags.com are good.

-          Choose a subject to blog, it should consist a wide range of topics around your industry. If you are in hotel business you can do travel and cuisines related posts.

-          Write posts like guides, tips, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) which serve some purpose to your customers and they feel valued through your blog.

-          Never write direct and promotional posts about your product until that is a niche product. No one is concerned about how many rooms you have in your hotel and so on, because for that you have your main website.

-          Give few backlinks from posts with preferred anchor text to your website and product pages.

-          Give a link from website navigation to the blog.

-          Theme and design of the blog could be slightly different also. But the best is to get it customized from any designer, so it looks somewhat similar to you main website.

-          Now visit other related blogs and participate by commenting to help other blogers by providing some industry insight, at the same time leave backlinks with preferred anchor text wherever required.

-          Don’t overdo and don’t act over-smart in blogsphere, because people just wanna learn here.

3. Forums Participation – Participate in your industry related forums to show your subject matter expertise. You can pick few interesting and popular forums and do leave some backlinks to your website wherever you comment with preferred anchor text.

4. Social Media Participation – For every small business it is almost mandatory to participate in some kind of social media activity wherever your customers hang-around. If you are in retail the decision making platform could be Facebook (Facebook for small business), MySpace, Twitter and Youtube. For commercial business LinkedIn (LinkedIn for small business) and Twitter are good platform to participate. Important thing here will be to allocate relevant amount of time for social media marketing because it could be addictive, lol. So to start with invest about 3-4 hours every week in social media marketing.

• 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

All these steps will help you to attract quality backlinks from related websites and visitors to your website also. As you will grow more online visibility through backlinks search engines will for sure start following you. So plan your website strategy around your customers and don’t let Google ruin your life.

Previous Post

• SEO for Small Business – Don’t let Google Ruin Your Life: Chapter 1

Following post

• Sponsored Placement Optimization or Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Optimization

Google-Asylum

I thought of writing something that will equip all small businesses to understand that SEO or Search Marketing is not a “Rocket Science” but an art. Understanding that if you are designing your website for search engines that is the worst thing you could do to your business. Because there is no assurance that search engines will get you traffic. But I advice to design your website for your customers. If your customers feel connected, you may get traffic from so many other sources like bookmarking, blogs, etc. Now let’s get going!!!!

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Basically any Search Engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo sends traffic to your website through two areas:

1. Organic, Natural or Free Placement
2. In-Organic or Paid Placement

what is search-marketing?

But understanding the fact that if you are not listed on first 2 pages for any search, chances are almost nil that you might get a visit. So there are 3 important functions of Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing:

1. On-Page Optimization
2. Off-Page Optimization or Link Building
3. Sponsored Placement Optimization or Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Optimization

We will discuss about the first function on this post and followed by other two posts for remaining functions.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

1. Marketing Persona Research / Website Framework

Just to make my post influencing I use such heavy words, but to be pretty frank this is quite easy task. You have to write down few problems that your customers are facing for which your product is the best. Then decide what elements you need to place in your website and which can be trashed. Decide on the website navigation, site structure, colors and style which will be best for your customers.

Example: If you are Hotelier and your customers are business travelers so your website should look different than for family or leisure travelers. Your customers should first identify with your website.

You can register a domain either with your brand name or according to the interest of your customer.

2. Keyword Research

Now you have figured out for which particular customer you are designing your website or for different set of customers. Figure out what they will search.

Example: A business traveler will search “business hotels in Tampa” and family travelers will “family hotels in Tampa” but very few “hotel in Tampa” or “xyz hotel Tampa” unless they know your hotel (and if they know you why will they go to search engine).

Now note down atleast 4 good keywords or search-words for each product or service. What is good, with good search volume and low competition of course but should be perfect to your small business niche.

Use Google’s free keyword tool to figure out the search volume and competition. 

3. URL writing

On first step we discussed to get a domain to which your customers will identify. Use the most important keyword in your domain registration. Find out What is domain?

Now Write URL of product pages effectively but accordingly using selected keywords.

Example: “www.yourwebsite.com/business-hotels-tampa” for business traveler segment and “www.yourwebsite.com/family-vacations-tampa” for family travelers

Use top category immediately after domain and sub categories after that

Example: “www.yourwebsite.com/family-vacations-tampa/spa-service”

4. Title Tag Optimization

Use your keyword while writing title tag in the html coding for pages, its very easy.  Just use maximum 90 charcters including space to write a title and make sure each page get different title. It’s like naming your pages. When we don’t name two drinks same why with website pages?

<title>Best Family Vacations in Tampa | Your Hotel</title>

5. Meta Tag Optimization

Meta tag is also an easy html element. Meta tag is something like describing your page in just 120 characters. So write unique meta tag describing your page, or product.

<meta name=“description” content=“Your hotels is the Best family vacation in Tampa providing ………………………………………………………..services.”/>

6. Keyword Tag Optimization

Keyword tag is just to add some more value to your page. Just add 10 related keywords comma separated.

<meta name=”keyword” content=“family hotels, tampa hotels, leisure and spa services, maxican food, chinese food”

7. Content Optimization

Writing text content of the webpages should be done in accordance to selected keywords effectively and should not cross 8-10% density amongst the total content of the webpage. The content or text copy in your website should at the same time be written for your customers not for your business partners.

8. Image Optimization

Images are very important to communicate with customers in effective way. Images also help to make the webpage look colorful and exciting. Choose images wisely which will help customers to feel associated. Just add name of image related to the keyword selected and small description of image via alt tag.

<a href=”/”><img src=”/images/family-vacation.jpg” alt=”family vacations in tampa” width=”215″ height=”60″ /></a>

9. Sitemap

Using site map for customers (html version) can be useful and handy. Your site map should be easy to understand with categories and other possible segmentation of your complete product list. So visitors of your web site find any service or product easily.

On-Page work is almost done now, but we will continue the series with other two functions on next posts, so keep tuned in.

Following posts

• Off-Page Optimization or Link Building and
• Sponsored Placement Optimization or Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Optimization

LinkedIn for small business

What’s LinkedIn?

1. More than 70 million professional users
2. More than 5 million users are decision makers
3. More than 3.7 million users are Small Business Professionals
4. More than 10 million users online every day
5. People turn to LinkedIn to create and manage their professional identities online
6. Every day professionals use LinkedIn to define themselves and their businesses to the world

How Linked is Useful for Small Business?

1. Reach to more Small Business decision makers
2. Establish our team as Subject Matter Expert in Small Business
3. Indulge Small Businesses in fruitful conversation
4. Effective place to find potential employees
5. Helps in SEO also
   

How to Do Linkedin?

1. Signup for a User LinkedIn Account, hope you have already one J
2. Create a Linkedin Business Page (Read Tutorial) (Watch a Video)
3. Add few Employees with some Area of Specialization
4. Join communities and discussions related to small business proactively
5. Participate in LinkedIn Answers related to small business (Watch a Video)

Read Top 3 Reasons to use LinkedIn Answers

How much is Too-Much?

Now when you have planned to step in, I will advice to set aside at least 1 hour every week for LinkedIn. Even if you say; “Man! I don’t have so much time” I would still suggest that this will be the most amazing investment for your small business that can set you apart from many others.

Facebook is good for your small business

For all the Small Businesses; your customers really wanna see you where they are! The hottest place these days for every one is Facebook. Kids, Mom & Dads are having fun around Facebook. You can easily understand and grab attention of your locally targeted customers through social media.

If your customers feel associated with your brand by the way they want, you will never wonder why you don’t see the familiar faces in your Coffeee-Shop or pet-Shop.

Being a small business or startup you have to use internet much more precisely; go to Facebook, Youtube & Twitter to mingle with your customers. Inbound Marketing Strategy will help you to beat the odds and outperform the Global Giants.

Hippos are cute!!! trust me

9 out of 10 Future Customers visits our website when they are in need. Management always knew that and all Marketing Watch-Dogs were asked to follow Hippos. Hippos decided on our website this will go here, that there and website was online. Days, weeks and months passed by and we got conversion or sales less than 1% of total visits on our website. Are our products are so bad that no one want them or competitors have a marketing team from Mars? Yes they do have an intelligent Marketing Team. They know how to use website analytics effectively.

There are so many free Website Analytic Tools like Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, Compete, Omniture and too many others. First of all try to install any one of them in your website. If you have already installed one of them, please look for the basic data on Dashboard:

Analytics could be great to measure!!

The Point!

The most important data here to care is Bounce Rate (people leaving website after visiting only one page). This suggests that your future customers don’t feel associated. I will never ask you to set a bench mark for first few months but to reduce the bounce rate as much as possible in a continuous speed.

But How?

First of all show this data to Hippos because data reflects the mind of your future customers. Now start Testing Landing Pages by making different looking pages for a same product. Take any one most popular product in your industry and make atleast 3 different looking pages. Experiment with colors, fonts, text on the page, images, buttons, providing free stuff and watever comes in your find. Use free tools like Google Website Optimizer during the test. Most of us use Search Advertising for testing so start a campaign for that product and make people see all the 3 test pages at the same time.

Now what?

Go back to data on the optimizer tool now and figure out which page is loved by visitors? Which page has less bounce rate and more conversion or sales if any? But data will show you what to do next!!!

Changing the way of Marketing

Being Intrenet Marketing professional it’s so fascinating to explore new ways to take our product to customers. Somehow I realized doing dedicated SEO & SEM are very important along with keeping a track of web analytics is just fine. But now every one is talking a different language

-          people want to see your blog too often than your origianl website

-          want to check your tweets and video stream, and so on.

Now for your Small Business This is very important that you talk the language everyone is talking otherwise no one will ever understand you. And your first question here is “How? I don’t have enough time”. Don’t press the panic button so early, this won’t take more time than you expected. Just follow some basics first and I will shoot heavy e-books in coming years.

Be more social

1. Get a website – you need to have a website which suits your business and customers at the same time
2. Get a twitter page its free – start few tweets every day (atleast 2) generic thoughts about your industry, link webpages that can help your customers
3. Get a youtube channel – however its gonna be slightly difficult to manage, but just give it a shot
4. Get a blog – create a official blog page for your business on wordpress or blogspot or any other platform, and randomly blog on subjects that will help your customers
5. Business Stationaries need to be reworked – try to match the colour & theme from your website, at the same time add links of your website, twitter, youtube, blog on your Business Cards

“This web 2.0 or 3.0 or new age marketing seems to be two way stuff than usual one way marketing push”, so just enjoy!

Amit eats and breathes Internet and love to find out more ways of Small Businesses Marketing at 2adproShop – Graphic Design Services

Small business decision-makers who use social media say they do so because of the convenience and speed with which they can access business-relevant information, according to a study by Business.com. In addition, those leaders who rely on social media for business purposes use on average 5.9 different social media resources.

The study found that among small business decision-makers who use social media for business information:

• 67% access webinar or podcast information.
• 63% use ratings and reviews of business products and services.
• 61% visit company profile pages on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Surveys suggest that the primary objectives of Small Business Advertisers for using social media are

• keeping up with the industry
• monitoring what is being said about their business and
• generating leads

The other significant objectives for using social media by small businesses are

• competitive intelligence
• improving customer experience and
• resolving problems

The Survey also suggested that Facebook is the most useful social media website rated by the small business advertisers followed by Linkedin and Myspace to increase the social awareness and keeoing up with industry on internet.

Credits:  2adproshop | Graphic Design Services for Small Business & Custom Logo Design

Considering the fact that complete advertising industry is affected by our economy in one way or another last year. Everyone would imagine that U.S. Small Business Internet Marketing spend will face most challenging time. On the contrary Small Business Advertisers are still very optimistic and the SMB Online Spend is expected to hit more than at least US$ 8 billion in 2010.

The total US Interactive marketing Spend in the year 2010 is expected to reach around US$ 30 billion, which is 13% of all ad spend and shows 13% year to year growth also.

According to a study about 69 percent of small business advertisers expected that their spending on online advertising for 2010 would be equal to or greater than last year. Among their criteria for selecting advertising opportunities are rates, proximity of the ad vehicle to business prospects, and repeating what they have done in the past. Around 50 percent of small business owners believe online advertising is effective — a number considerably higher than the rank they gave direct mail (32 percent), yellow pages (28 percent), and newspapers (27 percent).

According to another research SMBs currently only spend around 11% of their budget online, this is still a significant rise from 4% just a few years ago. It estimates a 275% increase in spending on streaming audio and video ads and around a 140% increase on email and direct ad spending in next few years.

The study also recommends that by 2013, the spending habits of SMBs are likely to be very different than today, when their interactive buys consist mainly of paid search (accounting for 85% of online advertising). In five years, 68% of their spending will be on paid search and video. For the time being the survey suggested, email marketing continues to be the most popular online channel among small businesses, ahead of online search, display advertising and social media marketing.

online-marketing-small-business-spending-plans-2010

• 57% on email programs to current clients.
• 57% developing a company website.
• 55% on email programs to potential clients.

Sponsored by 2adproshop Graphic Design Services for Small Business

Creating a brand on Internet is more than important today, without a well constructed online brand any business can be just any other business today, thus Internet Marketing Advertising is required taking the business to internet and making it visible to every one.

Importance on Internet

Last few years have shown tremendous growth in Internet users and the way social networking and business networking can be used to provide infinite business opportunities worldwide. On Dec 31, 2000 the total number of internet users was only 360,985,492 including 4,514,400 in Africa, 114,304,000 in Asia, 105,096,093 in Europe, 3,284,800 in Middle East, 108,096,800 in North America, 18,068,919 in Caribbean & Latin America and 7,628,480 in Australia.

According to the latest data of internet users, the total internet users worldwide are 1,581,571,589 which is almost thrice the number on Dec 31, 2000. The latest trends for internet users is 54,171,500 in Africa, 650,361,843 in Asia, 390,141,073 in Europe, 45,861,346 in Middle East, 246,822,986 in North America, 173,619,140 in Caribbean & Latin America and 20,593751 in Australia.

The total population of world is 6,710,029,070 which means the penetration of internet is about 24% & growth is 338% during 2000-2008.

Online Brand-Building Process

1. Online Visual Appearance
2. Social Media Optimization
3. Press Release, Article Release and Video Release
4. Brand Monitoring

Online Visual Appearance: Online Visual Appearance of any business/product/service is consisted of two main features:

1. Website Development: Developing a website for listing products & services is very important to present amongst the prospective customers. At the same time some importance must be paid to provide details of existing clients, company values and other details of the organization. The Website must be so informative that almost every visitor can be turned to a client.
2. Online Banner-Ads on various targeted Websites help to establish the brand in short span of time by reaching to the desired market share easily. Banner-Ad is graphical web advertising, which provide a great amount of creativity to present the business.

Social Media Optimization: Social Media Optimization is a part of Website Marketing & Website  Promotions that can be very huge subject to take care and we only have so many hours every day, so try to work on only best tricks of Social Media Marketing. It includes using Social and Business Networking, Social Book Marking & Blogging.

1. Using Social & Business Networks: Social Networks like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and Business Networks like Linkedin can be used to setup a profile of companies to increase its Brand-Value and visibility.
2. Social Book Marking: Use best Social Book Marking Websites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Diigo, Clipmarks, Stumbleupon & Propeller to tag website with relevant keywords.
3. Blogging: Creating blogs or web logs using wordpress, blogger, ibibo, livejournal, bebo, vox, live space by msn and yahoo 360 should be used to post content related to products & services offered. Make sure to mention a link to the website without making much stress otherwise that may be termed as a spam.

Press Release, Article Release & Video Release: Using Websites like Freepressrelease, prlog, pressreleasepoint, i-newswire, pr.com can be used to make press-releases of recent activities in the organization.

Using ezinearticles, a1articles, articlebiz, articlebase, selseo can be used to submit articles regarding to your industry and acquiring few backlinks.

Youtube, revver, blip, dailymotion, motionbox can be used to upload videos regarding to your products & services catering information to the desired target market and impress them with creativity.

Brand Monitoring: Using tools like google alerts, twitter search & filtrbox, external discussions about the company, services and products can be easily monitored, thus Brand image on internet can be tracked and improved taking criticism positively and constructively.

Benefits of Strong Online Branding

1. Lasting Impression
2. Customer Loyalty
3. Perception of Quality
4. More Traffic & Business Opportunities

Lasting Impression: Strong Online Brand Building gives a lasting impression & help to get super rewarded for individuality.

Customer Loyalty: People build a close bond with brand identities and in addition they will often refer products to friends & family.

Perception of Quality: Strong Brand always gives a perception of quality about products to the potential customers

More Online Traffic & Business Opportunities: Good Online Branding provides more quality traffic & business opportunities to make sales online.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice to enhance ranking of any web page or website on search engines like google or yahoo, for any keyword or keyword phrase search. This includes optimizing the on-page optimization and off-page optimization factors, which makes direct effect on ensuring Search Engine Positioning and Search Engine Ranking.

Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

Basic aim of Web marketing is to increase the visibility of any product or service on Internet all over the world. Now when 80% of all website traffic comes from search engine, it is very important that search engines do direct traffic to any website where products and services are listed.

At this very moment SEO comes in the picture to make it possible, so we can have more search engine traffic.

Types of SEO

1. White Hat SEO: This includes following all the parameters of search engines to enhance ranking. This is also called Organic or Natural Ranking.
2. Black Hat SEO: This includes the unaccepted methods to increase the ranking of any website; following these techniques can cause penalties for websites.
3. Gray Hat SEO: This is a mix method of White Hat and Black Hat SEO techniques; at times it is accepted by search engines.

Tasks for Search Engine Optimization of any website.

1. On-Page optimization factors

1. Keyword Research: Searching keywords is a very important step, where any business can make or break. We need to be very careful to lookout for the word which is highly searched on search engines, while the competing pages are not very high. So we will be quick to rank higher for that particular keyword search.
2. URL writing: writing URL effectively according to the selected keyword will be an additional benefit for the on-page optimization of the web page. Registering Domain Name in accordance to the keyword selection is also helpful.
3. Title Tag & Meta Tag Optimization: Writing effective title and meta tag description or the web page in accordance to the keyword selected again is required.
4. Content Optimization: Content of the webpage should be carefully written using the selected keywords effectively and should not cross 8-10% density amongst the total content of the webpage.
5. Page structure: using CSS or cascade style sheet, using alt text for images, using headers and footer links, using H1/H2/H3 tags also make webpage more search engine friendly.
6. Site Map: Using site map for web site can be useful and handy; site map should be made in normal format for the visitors of web site to find any service or product easily.

1. Off-Page Optimization

1. Search Engine Submission and Directory Submission: submitting website to search engines and directories with higher PR value is necessary.
2. Article Release, Press Release & Blogging: Releasing articles related to the products and services provides backlink opportunity, at the same time creating blogs & press releases are also very effective and helpful to get traffic and Brand Building.
3. PPC & Banner –AD Campaigns: PPC campaigns or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) of Google, yahoo or any other network provides filtered quality traffic; while CPM or Banner-AD helps in Brand Building again.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

1. Quality Traffic: SEO provides higher quality traffic from all the search engines, which can easily be converted in to sales.
2. Online Visibility: higher positioning in search engines provides higher online exposure and visibility all over the world.
3. Brand Awareness: higher positioning in search engines for any search result provide Brand Awareness for the website and company at the same time for products all over the world.
4. Higher Sales Opportunities: for any keyword search when a website comes at higher position, there are more chances that visitor will follow search engine and business opportunities can go up.

Credit: Accord Internet Marketing | SEO Company India | Search Engine Ranking |

With the help of Internet Marketing and Internet Advertising keeps Online Media along different stages of the your customer engagement cycle through search engine Marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail Marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies, to increase your Brand Development and Brand Awareness all over the world.

Niche of Internet Marketing over Conventional Marketing

One-to-one approach
Marketing messages reach to the target audience personally, with our Search Marketing Strategies, where the advertisements are based on search engine keywords entered by the user.

Appeal to specific interests
Internet Marketing and Geo Marketing Strategies place an emphasis on Marketing those appeals to a specific behavior or interest.

Different content by choice
With Specific Content by Choice Tool users have the choice to select their country location first and are then presented with different site or article content depending on their selection.

Automated different content
Automated different content through Internet Marketing and Geo-Marketing is utilized to deliver different content based on the geographical geo-location.

Effective Statistics Measurement
Provides the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively. All aspects of an Internet Marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested.