You must spend some time with your website if you want to see a return on your web marketing efforts.

Anyone can put up a website, but you need to always be thinking about how, will I get people to my website and how will I get those visitors to take some type of action.

Don’t build a website or buy some web hosting package or setup a blog if you don’t have a plan for marketing that website. Your website and your presence online really is like a living breathing organism. You have to feed it, water it, care for it, if you want it to grow.

6 Things that you can do each week so help improve your “presence” online

1. Blog. Blogging seems sort of old school with Twitter and Facebook on the scene, but blogging is still critical
2. Submit an article: Take a blog post and submit it to an article directory.
3. Google Analytics: Check out your analytics. Are you noticing any trends? Is time on site increasing? How is your bounce rate?
4. Drive Traffic with Social Media: Engage in the conversations on Twitter and Facebook that matter to you and drive some traffic to your website.
5. Add video to your blogs. The reach of video is amazing. Not only can you post your video on your website or blog, but it also goes to YouTube, Facebook, Viddler, MetaCafe, Yahoo, Myspace.. on and on.
6. Drive some traffic with PPC: PPC is pay per click advertising. In the new world of Social media people are discounting the value of PPC. I’m not a big believer of putting all my eggs in one basket and I know that my followers on Twitter can be fickle. Fork over a little cash to Google or Yahoo! and drive some targeted traffic to your website.

My challenge to you is to pick one of the 6 things listed above.  For example, build a habit of blogging over the next month and then try out video blogging.

Committed to Your Success,
Rodney Bartlett
Lead Instructor – Reachd.com

Yesterday was our first blogging course in Wichita KS. During the course I was reminded that the key to a great blog is the content. Blog hosting, Blog themes, widgets, and plug-ins mean nothing if the content is not engaging or worthwhile. In the video above, I listed three tips for writing blog content. The blog tips are listed below as well.

1. Write Your Content for Your readers – It is important in each post to keep your audience in mind. One mistake that I often see people make is  creating blog posts that are solely targeted at their industry. It is okay to write an industry focused blog posts, in fact great industry posts can help raise your profile, but primarily you should be focused on your prospective clients or customers. Write or record posts that will help your customers and it will help build your business.

2. Post to your blog regularly – That does not mean that you should post everyday, but if a prospective client visits your blog and the last post was from 90 days ago, what might the visitor to your blog think about you or your business? Build a blogging routine and post to your blog at least once per week.

3. Write Compelling and Keyword Rich blog titles – Compelling titles will entice people to read your blog. Keyword rich titles will help google understand a bit more about what that specific blog post is about.

Post to your blog regularly and post content that is beneficial to your visitor and you will see your business grow.

Below are the remaining training opportunities for the month of July. We have changed our pricing structure at Reachd. If you choose any 3 of the courses below you will automatically receive a 15% discount, and a 20% discount if you choose 5

VANCOUVER:

1. Explode Your Growth with a Blog
3 hour instruction on why businesses should be blogging and steps for setting up & building a blog
July 16th, $149.00/seat – Vancouver – (Register Here)

2. Build a Website Google Loves
3 hour class on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Learn to get your website to rank higher.
July 21st, $149.00/seat – Vancouver – (Register Here)

3. Broadcast Your Message with Online Video
3 hour class – Learn to use online video to build relationships, build your brand, & promote your business. Each participants receives a free flip video camera.
July 28th, $250.00/seat – Vancouver – (Register Here)

4. Social Media Guide
Learn to use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to prospect, communicate and build your business.
July 30th, $149.00/seat – Vancouver – (Register Here)

WICHITA:

1. Explode Your Growth with a Blog
3 hour instruction on why businesses should be blogging and steps for setting up & building a blog
July 14th, $149.00/seat – Wichita – (Register Here)

2. Build a Website Google Loves
3 hour class on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Learn to get your website to rank higher.
July 21st, $149.00/seat – Wichita – (Register Here)

3. Broadcast Your Message with Online Video
3 hour class – Learn to use online video to build relationships, build your brand, & promote your business. Each participants receives a free flip video camera.
July 28th, $250.00/seat – Wichita – (Register Here)

4. Social Media Guide
Learn to use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to prospect, communicate and build your business.
July 30th, $149.00/seat – Wichita – (Register Here)

Leave a comment below or message me on twitter if you have questions about any of the training

An XML sitemap is a feed to the search engine of where all the pages on your website reside. It includes information like, the address of your webpages, the date the pages were changed, and the importance of the pages related to other pages on your site. An XML sitemap is the best way for Google to index and crawl your site deeply. Every website owner that is committed to search engine optimization should have an XML sitemap on their website.

You can read more about XML sitemap protocol here – http://sitemap.org

If you’d like to have a sitemap generated for you, you can go here.

My recommendation would be to have your website on a content management system. Make sure that your content management system includes the ability to generate and XML sitemap for you. If the content management system cannot generate a sitemap, I would be suspicious about the system’s capability of producing a search engine friendly website.

We use Ubertor to host our website. It is designed for Real Estate Agents, but is flexible enough for small – medium size businesses and non-profits. If you are using WordPress for your website, be sure that you use this wordpress plugin to generate an XML sitemap.

Choosing the right keyword phrase is important in search engine optimization. There are a few questions that you will want to answer when it comes to selecting a keyword phrase:

1. How much search volume is there for your keyword phrase?
2. Does your keyword phrase convert?
3. How competitive is your keyword phrase?

In the video below, I will focus on the third question – “How competitive is your keyword phrase?”

Here are three searches that you can do on Google to give you a picture of the competiveness of your keyword phrase

1. Go to Google.com and search for your keyword phrase in quotes. This search will show you the number of pages that Google has indexed that include your keyword phrase. The higher the number the more competitive your phrase might be
2. Go to Google.com and search for allintitle: “your keyword phrase” This search will rank pages solely based on their titles. Title tags are important search engine factors
3. Go to Google.com and search for allinanchor:”your keyword phrase” This search will rank pages solely based on the anchor text pointing to those pages.
4. Compare the allintitle and allinanchor searches. If those two searches on Google are almost identical, then you have a highly competitive keyword phrase on your hands.

Competition does not mean that you should shy away from a keyword, but you should be prepared to work much harder and expect the results to take a long time. If time is not a luxury that you have, then you will want to target a different keyword phrase.

I’m excited to take this opportunity to introduce our new Vancouver instructor, Dara Sklar

Dara is the owner, founder and overall guru at Realty Support Services. She has been helping realtors maintain their websites and promote their listings online since 2005. You can read more about Dara’s happy Realty Support clients here. Beyond helping realtors Dara has recently started another business, which helps small business build and maintain their web presence called Real Websites.

What makes Dara a perfect person to teach the Reachd Courses?

• She is a business owner and entrepeneur herself. She understands your struggles and the challenges of everyday demands of business owners. You wear multiple hats and have to keep an eye on customer service, marketing, sales on top of Twitter, Blogging and SEO.
• Dara has attended all of the Reachd courses as well as consulted with a few of our students on their Adwords and social media efforts. She knows her stuff!
• Dara has the perfect mix of Tech Geek and Business owner. A Reachd instructor has to have the right mix of experience and expertise. You don’t want to listen to someone teach that is always talking technical jargon that you don’t understand. Because of Dara’s experience, she knows how to take web marketing principles that are new to you and present them to you in a way that makes sense

Classes Dara will be teaching in June. I will be present for each of these courses but we will be using the dates below to give Dara experience in teaching the Reachd Courses. If you have attended Reachd training in the past and would like a re-fresher, drop me an email so that I can get you into one of these courses at a reduced rate.

• June 18th Market Like a Sniper with Adwords
• June 22nd Explode Your Growth with a Blog
• June 23rd Broadcast Your Message with Online Video
• June 24th Build a Website Google Loves
• June 25th Social Media Guided Tour

Committed to Your Success
Rodney Bartlett
Lead Instructor – Reachd.com

These are the principles I Tweet by on Twitter.

First let me say there are no rules on Twitter, besides their terms of service, which I am sure you are all intimately familiar with (sarcasm intended!) Having said that their are no rules there are some principles that I think you should live by on Twitter. Depending on your purpose for using Twitter (assuming you have a specific purpose in mind) some of these principles may or may not apply. Enough of the pre-amble let’s get down to the principles.

1. Conversation – In my opinion Twitter is not just a place for broadcasting. If all you say on Twitter is “look at me” “buy my stuff”, then your followers will quickly tune you out. One exception. If you are a business offering deals on twitter, then it is okay to broadcast about your deals because people are following you to get the exclusive deals.

I approach twitter with the thought, “How can I say something on Twitter that will (1) help build Reachd (2) Help others succeed in their business”

2. The Follow Back Debate. I don’t follow everyone that follows me. Why? I don’t want to. Some of the people that follow me are spammers. When you follow me, I actually take the time to look at your profile and determine if you have anything of value to say.  If we form a “relationship on twitter” could it help your business or my business. Some people think this is an arrogant stance but that’s up for you to decide. If you are using a business account for Twitter, I think you should follow back everyone that follows you. In the case of your personal account I don’t think it is required.

3. Think before you Tweet. This tip comes courtesy of @Gillianshaw of the Vancouver Sun. She said, don’t say anything on Twitter that you do not want published on the front page of your local newspaper. Google is also indexing your Tweets, so think before you tweet.

4. Keep it Real. I love my business, I’m passionate about my business and about helping business owners. I also have personal interests and a family and when appropriate I allow some of those personal things to leak into my twitter posts. Twitter is a great way for people to get to know me and not just my business.

Those are a few Twitter principles that I tweet by. They are not really how to’s but more guiding principles. What would you add to the list?

Share this post on Twitter or share your comments on this blog

Committed to Your Success
Rodney Bartlett
Lead Instructor – Reachd.com

June 12th and 19th we are offering a brand new course at Reachd.

It is a 1 day web marketing Jumpstart. The idea for this course was spurred on by Vic Jang the owner of several Sutton real estate offices in Vancouver. We already have realtors from Vancouver as well as agents from Calgary flying in for the course.

The course is about learning as well as doing. There will be about a 70 – 30 split in the day. 70% information and 30% actually putting the information into practice.

What items will be covered?

• Getting Started with Twitter and Facebook
• Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
• Basics of Blogging
• Basics of using online Video

Two special bonuses

• Free Flip Video Camera for all participants ($125.00 Value)
• Free Ubertor Website for 6 months (Expires June 5th – TODAY)

Register for the 1 day bootcamp

Or drop your questions in the comments section of this blog!

Last week I showed you have you can check quickly to see if Google has your website indexed. If you find that a page or that your website is not indexed what should you do? Some might be asking this question: How do I submit my site to Google? I would suggest you don’t submit your site via their URL submit tool, but rather create a sitemap and submit your site that way.

Below is a Video that will talk about 3 ways you can get your pages indexed in Google.

In the Video we talk about 3 things.

1. Submit an XML sitemap

2. Write a blog post about your new page and link to that page

3. Have other write a post and link to that page on your website.

If you have questions or comments, let me know by commenting below.

We have full slate of internet marketing courses for the month of June. Below is a list of all the courses that we have on the calendar for this month. I will list the online courses first and then the in person training will follow.

Reachd Online Courses for June. We’ve been holding our online courses for several months now. The courses are held in a private online meeting room using GoToMeeting. Each course lasts for 1 hour followed by 15 – 30 minutes of Q & A. In June we are organizing our online courses different. This month we are only teaching about Search Engine Optimization.

June 4th 8:30am PST
SEO Session 4: Tour of Google Webmaster Tools and Site Technical Issues

June 11th 8:30am PST
SEO Session 5: Overview of Inbound Linking Strategies (IBL)

June 12th 12:00pm PST
Reachd Question and Answer Session (Reachd Elite Members Only)

June 18th 8:30am PST
SEO Sessi0n 6: Linking – Directory Submissions and Link Exchanges

June 24th 8:30am PST
Ubertor SEO Training – Learn to Use the Ubertor SEO Enhancement

June 25th 8:30am PST
SEO Session 7: IBL – Article Marketing, Press Releases & Social Media

June 26th 12:00pm PST
Reachd Question and Answer Session (Reachd Elite Members Only)

That is our complete list of our online courses. If you’d like to take all of our online courses and participate in the group question and answer sessions then the register for the Reachd Elite. The cost is $100 dollars / month and gives you access to all our training online. Go to our online training page to find out more about the courses offered.

In person web marketing courses in Vancouver for the month of June
We are holding our courses several times this month because we are in the process of training a new instructor. If you are a past Reachd student and would like a re-fresher on the training this would be a great month to attend. We’d like to offer you a discount to the training if you will help us train our new teacher. Email me for more details.

June 2nd 2pm – 5pm
Market Like a Sniper with Google Adwords – 3 Hour Adwords Training

June 9th 2pm – 5pm
Explode Your Growth with a Blog – 3 Hour Blog Training

June 12th 8:30 – 5:30pm
1 Day Web Marketing Bootcamp for Realtors

June 16th 2pm – 5pm
Build a Website Google Loves – 3 Hour SEO Training

June 18th 2pm – 5pm
Market Like a Sniper with Google Adwords – 3 Hour Adwords Training

June 19th 2pm – 5pm
1 Day Web Marketing Bootcamp for Realtors

June 22nd 2pm – 5pm
Explode Your Growth with a Blog – 3 Hour Blog Training

June 23rd 2pm – 5pm
Broadcast Your Message with Online Video – 3 Hour Video Training

June 24th 2pm – 5pm
Build a Website Google Loves – 3 Hour SEO Training

June 25th 2pm – 5pm
Social Media Guided Tour – 3 Hour Social Media Marketing Course

If you made it through that entire list of training good for you. If you have questions, you can email me, or drop a comment on this post. Thanks!