Why does every business need a blog

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Blogging is not just for bloggers but it’s for businesses as well. Every online business whether it’s a services company, retailer, manufacturer or wholesaler should maintain an active blog. The reasons are a lot and below I will try to explain why every business needs a blog, what to expect from it and how to do it correctly so that you won’t lose your money and time.

A blog is part of a well-designed content marketing strategy and if run correctly can very quickly become the best source of referrals for a company. If you think about it, the blog is the ‘face’ and ‘voice’ of the company and a great direct way to reach out and communicate with your existing or potential customers. Besides that, a blog can also provide the following advantages:

Content freshness – One of the most important reasons as to why you should run a blog on your business website is content freshness. A blog will help you publish fresh content and provide another incentive for search engines and people to come back and check out what’s new.

Content on a business website is usually static. You have pages about your products and services, you have your contact us and about page and pretty much that’s the type of content you have on most business websites.

A blog will contribute in keeping the site active and also increase the number of pages a website has, something that will gradually generate more benefits in the long run.

Fresh content is also good for SEO and particularly one of the most effective practices for google SEO.

Better internal linking – I have talked extensively about the importance of internal linking and a blog is the best way to do it naturally. Through your blog posts you can highlight and pinpoint the most important pages of your website and ‘assist’ both users and search engine crawlers find them easier.

Cross selling and up selling – Through a blog you can create new needs for your existing customers and sell them more products (cross selling) or convince them to buy your most expensive products (up selling).

For example let’s say you are selling different types of wireless mouse, a well prepared blog post about the benefits of having a wireless mouse and the advantages of a particular type can help new customers realise that they should get a wireless mouse and not wired and that spending $20 more to buy the particular type is worth it.

Customer service – A blog is another form of communication between you (the company) and its customers. You can use it to answer customer questions, educate them about your services and give them another way to contact and interact with you via blog comments.

Demonstrate your expertise – The most valuable asset of any company are the human resources and the expertise and experience they have about their business. A blog can help a company demonstrate their areas of expertise to the outside World. You can use the blog to pass more messages to your audience than an advertisement and you can do it for free and any time you want.

For social media – In order to succeed with social media you need to share good quality content on a regular basis and a company blog can be one of your best sources. The combination of content marketing with a solid social media strategy is what differentiates successful online businesses from businesses that strive to survive online.

You can also read 5 online marketing strategies for small businesses that work for more information on how small businesses can take advantage of online marketing strategies.

Announce new products and special offers – Besides enhancing customer service a blog is another way to say thank you to your customers by giving them special offers and announcing new product launches. You can use the blog to publish exclusive information about your new products or services, find beta users depending on the niche etc.

Get Customer feedback – You can use the blog as the medium to run polls or questionnaires to get direct feedback from your customers. Remember to always give incentives to people to fill in a questionnaire or poll otherwise the participation levels will be low.

Get more traffic – I left this one for last but one of the reasons you should run a blog is to get more traffic to your business website. If you run the blog correctly (as we will see in more details below) it can become one of your major sources of traffic.

A business blog is not the same as a normal blog where a blogger writes about a subject he/she is passionate about. Business blogs are more difficult to gain loyal followers especially if readers are not customers or interested to become customers of the company. That’s why it is more important to do it correctly.

You don’t need to have good content – That’s correct, you don’t need to have good content on your business blog but you need to have great content! Your business blog is a mirror of your business experience and expertise and this should be reflected in the published content.

Anyone reading your articles should be one step closer to become a customer otherwise your better stop thinking of having a blog altogether.

A common mistake I see in many businesses is maintaining a blog for the sake of having a blog and they only publish mediocre content they buy from content writers. The result is a waste of time, money and for some cases a negative impact on their brand, services or products.

It’s an investment – Consider your business blog as a long term investment instead of a short term tool. As with any other investment you need to be patient and follow a specific plan with measurable targets in order for your investment to be effective.

Don’t look for cheap ways to publish content but look on how your published content can really make a difference.

A good blog needs to have a face – A blog needs to have a face. Readers should know who is behind the blog, what is their background and expertise and how to connect with them.

Have employees contribute – Instead of buying content why not have all the employees of the company contribute to the company blog. Create a policy that all employees should contribute once a month in the blog by creating relevant content related to your products or services. Maybe this is a new project they are working on or their experience so far with customer support… A brain storming session during the next staff meeting can do wonders in this area.

Implement Google authorship – This is strongly related with the note made above about the need to show a face in your blog. Good company blogs should take it a step further where all contributors to the blog have a verified Google+ profile. This will not only help your SEO efforts but it will increase traffic and social mentions.

Need to have a newsletter – A blog and newsletter are two strongly related concepts. Email marketing has a lot to offer to businesses and a blog is a fantastic way to grow your email list naturally.

A nice way to stay in touch with your users is to send out a newsletter every time you update your blog. There are many services like mailchimp or feedburner that can help you automate this task.

Make sure you reply to comments – I mentioned above that a blog is a good way to communicate with your customers and this means that you should reply to each and every comment made on your posts. Show your readers that you care about what they say and that you actually respond to their requests.  Finally make sure that you do not publish spam comments for the sake of increasing your comment count but only concentrate on what has value for your readers.

A blog is a very useful tool for every business. The biggest mistake that most companies make is running a blog without having a content strategy or without having specific measurable targets for the blog. They only have a blog because it’s good to have one or because their web designers told them that they need to have a blog option in their website.

Although you can employ many of the ingredients of having a successful blog and use them on your business blog, what you should concentrate more is having a steady increase in followers, loyal readers and user interaction rather than just plain increase in rankings and traffic.

Contact us today to help you design your business blog strategy and make another step to bypass your online competitors.

Let me help you build a successful blog or business online

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About the author

Alex has more than 12 years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. He studied Computing and eCommerce and the last 5 years he is making a living on-line. You can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Internet Marketing tips for small business owners

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Small business owners have a lot to gain from Internet Marketing.  The Internet can help a business grow and Internet Marketing will help you take full advantage of all the opportunities created in the online world.

What do we mean by small businesses?

When we talk about small businesses we essentially mean any company that operates in the online or offline World and may or may not have clients online. We tend to use the term ‘small businesses’ since large corporations most probably have dedicated departments that take care of their Internet marketing and online presence.

I have the opportunity to talk with small business owners on a daily basis explaining to them how Internet marketing can help them expand and find new customers and there are a couple of questions that I am asked all the time from people operating in different niches. I am sharing the questions below since I am sure that it will help other business owners understand a bit more about Internet Marketing.

I am not selling online, why do I need Internet Marketing? This is the top question coming from business owners who are not selling any products or services online. The answer is very simple and straightforward.

Even if you are not selling online you still need Internet Marketing because nowadays purchasing decisions are influenced by online searches. People like to research a product or service before making the decision to purchase and if you are not found when they are doing their searches, you are missing great opportunities.

To give you a more convincing reason, in a recent study by Nielsen and Google regarding the use of mobile for shopping, it was found that 84% of smartphone shoppers use their devices to shop while in store. This is only a very simple example that shows the importance of having an efficient online presence (both web and mobile) for small businesses.

My customers are not on Facebook, why spend money on something that won’t give me any return? This is another question that is worth discussing. Internet Marketing is not only about Facebook or Google as many people believe. As we will see below (and as it is shown in the picture above), Social Media is only one of the tools available in your campaign (see also: difference between digital marketing and social media).

A proper Internet Marketing campaign will cover a number of online technologies and will concentrate more on those that provide a higher ROI for your business. If your customers don’t use Facebook but they search related items in Google then more preference will be given to Search Engine Marketing.

I am already into this but so far I haven’t seen any results? Another common comment I hear very often is people telling me that they are already doing Internet marketing but they have not noticed any good results. After we discuss in detail their particular case, we come to the conclusion that:

They either hired a person or company that they don’t know what they are doing (besides taking their money)They don’t use metrics so they don’t know if what they are doing is for the better or worseThey concentrate on measuring traffic and not conversions – traffic is very important but what is more important for a businesses is to make more sales, find new customers, explore new markets etc

In order to take advantage of Internet Marketing it is essential not to make the above 3 mistakes i.e. to hire the wrong person or company (read this: How to outsource SEO without paying a fortune ), not having statistics before, during and after each campaign and giving more value to traffic than to actual conversions.

I have mentioned many times above that Internet marketing can help a business grow, but this is only one of the advantages or benefits to small business owners. In summary Internet Marketing can help you:

Find new customers from the different online markets – As you are reading this there are millions of people searching Google, Yahoo and Bing for content or products, there are thousands of people that use the Apple Store, Google Play Store and Amazon AppStore to download applications on their mobiles and there are millions of people using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and a dozen of other social networks.

A well designed and efficient Internet Marketing campaign will penetrate all those markets and get your company in the monitor of every potential customer.

Get you in front of the competition – Take the example I mentioned above from the Nielsen / Google study where users use their mobile for research before making a purchasing decision. If during their research they don’t find your website (either because you don’t have one or because it is not optimized) and they find your competitors website then what will happen? Most probably you will be losing customers to your competitors.

On the other hand if you have a good website that is optimized for all devices and users then you have more chances of getting those customers and the investment you are making to Internet Marketing will keep you in front of the competition.

Get to know your customers better, what they prefer and need – I am sure that you have read about customer engagement before but let me give you a real example on how Internet Marketing can help you achieve this.

One of my clients is BezAmbar.com (designer of innovative jewelry for men and women) and they are using Facebook to get their customers opinion about new designs and products. Check their Facebook page and look at the comments. It is a fantastic example of how companies can ‘hear’ their customers and get their feedback for products even before they are released.

Now that we are all in synch as to what Internet Marketing can offer to businesses let us examine below how you can do that in practice.

Note: If you are confused as to what you need to do or if you don’t have the time or staff to deal with Internet Marketing then your next best choice is to hire an Internet Marketing company to do the work for you. You can review our seo packages and contact us to discuss how we can help you, always taking into account that the cost of internet marketing services is reasonable and there is a great return for your investment.

Internet Marketing (as shown in the above diagram) has a number of components. If you follow the list from the left we have:

Web Site: It may sound silly but Yes you need to have a website in order to do Internet Marketing and still more than 50% of businesses in America don’t have a website. Once you create your website, you need to make sure that it is of high quality and that it is based on best standards and practices.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing): When you have a high quality website the next step is to work on Search Engine Marketing. SEM has 3 parts which are very important for the overall success of any campaign:

1)      On page SEO – Optimizations to give your website better visibility in search engines but also to make it friendlier to use by people

2)      Off page SEO – techniques you can use to promote your website using legitimate white hat practices

3)      PPC – Take advantage of the Pay per click advertising platforms (Google Adwords, Yahoo ads etc) to bring your message to more people.

These 3 parts are independent from each other but for optimum results you need to utilize them all.

Social Media Marketing: Very popular method to promote your online business and recent studies show that there is an increasing rate of conversion from social media traffic, something that is very encouraging for social media marketers. Read my social media marketing tips for beginners for more detail information.

Content Marketing: People love content and the companies that can provide their potential clients with the right content are winning at the end. This is not something new but with the increasing number of people online and their continuous hunt for quality information, if you want to stay on top you need to invest in content marketing.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

If you are selling coffee makers then your website needs to have top quality content related to coffee makers including product descriptions, technical characteristics, customer reviews, maintenance information, customer support forums, images, videos, comparison tools etc.

If you are not selling online but you have a law firm looking for local clients then your website should have information about your company, staff, expertise, location, portfolio, ways to make an appointment, general advice about law related matters etc.

Email Marketing: Everybody has an email address and companies that can get valid email addresses of their potential and existing customers have many opportunities to make cross selling or increase their customer base. The success or not of email marketing depends on many factors but it is important to use email marketing as part of your overall Internet marketing campaign and not as a standalone service.

For example, when you are about to release a new product or service or open a new store you can email your customers and let them know by also giving them a 10% discount or some other form of reward to make them happy for receiving your message.

If instead you use email to send messages with no real value for them, most probably they will consider it as spam and this will gradually have a bigger impact on your business.

Mobile Marketing: Mobile usage is on the rise and as more people get their hands into smartphones, the importance of mobile marketing is increasing. Google is already investing a lot of money on mobile research and they believe that mobile marketing isn’t an option but it’s an imperative for every business.

The first thing you need to make sure is that your website is mobile friendly i.e. it is optimized for viewing on the various mobile devices. Next is to ensure that your mobile friendly website is SEO optimized. Google has started penalizing mobile websites that are not SEO optimized so it is very important not only to have a mobile friendly website but to have an optimized site.

Other than that, you can also invest in creating native mobile apps for the different mobile markets and find even more customers. Read this Mobile web site Vs Native App if you don’t know the difference between the two.

Banner Advertising: Besides the above methods there is also the traditional option to advertise on other related websites. If there are quality websites or blogs in your niche that offer advertising space, it’s not a bad idea to run a couple of test campaigns and evaluate the results.

The biggest mistake that people do when it comes to buying advertising from other websites is not measuring the return on investment. In other words you need to know what users do from the time they click on your ad, how much time they spend on your site, which pages they visit, what actions they take and how many of them convert i.e. made a purchase. When you have all this info you can decide whether or not to continue running the ads.

Internet marketing is a must of every serious business even if it is not depending on the Internet to make sales. Whether you are selling a product or service you need to invest in your Internet presence of all the reasons explained above and for the simplest reason of all: this is how business is done today and you have no other choice than follow the trend.

Internet marketing works and there are many examples of businesses that have expanded because of the Internet but you need to do it correctly and consistently in an ongoing process.

Finally, if you don’t have the knowledge to do this in-house, it is one of the most appropriate services to outsource and gain from the main benefits.

Local SEO Checklist for small business

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The term local SEO is unknown to many small business owners but for some businesses this is all they need to succeed online. Our comprehensive local SEO checklist will help you optimize your website for local search.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, go straight to the local SEO Checklist.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it appears in the first positions of Google, Bing and Yahoo for searches that are related to your area / city / country.  Let me give you a couple of examples to understand this better.

Example 1: lawyers in Nevada

When a user types in the location in the search query then the intent is clear and Google will try to satisfy the user by returning in the top results businesses (in this case law firms) that are registered to operate in the state of Nevada. How does Google know where a company is operating? This is something we will see in a while…

Example 2:  florists in London

When you search google.co.uk for the term florists in London you will get a list of flower shops that have a live business in the general area of London.

Example 3: Italian restaurants in New York City

 

On your next trip to New York open Google and type Italian restaurants in New York City and I am sure that the returned results will help you choose a nice restaurant to enjoy a memorable pasta or Pizza. Why? Because as we will see below you have to prove that your business deserves one of the top positions in their search results and they are very careful of which businesses to showcase.

The list could go on and on but the general idea about local SEO is that the user wants to find an address or a telephone number so as to take a visit or call to satisfy a requirement.

Someone may say that local SEO is similar to long tail SEO but with the location added in the query string and this is correct. Actually we can say that people looking for local businesses are the most targeted searches you can find online.

From the examples above it is clear that every business that has an address and operates in a certain area needs local SEO. Do you own a restaurant, a barber shop, a law firm? Are you a doctor, mechanic or a retailer? You need to have a website that is optimized for local SEO.

People use the Internet to search for a businesses before they actually visit and if they don’t find you it’s obvious that you are losing customers and opportunities and someone else will take advantage of them.

Increase your chances of appearing high in the SERPS – As you can see from the images above, businesses that are chosen to appear in Google search results (including Google Places for Business listing) are more likely to receive more visits than websites that don’t appear in the recommendations.

More conversions – There is a high rate of conversion since visitors coming to the website from local search are highly targeted.

Brand Visibility and awareness – More people searching for businesses in your area will know about your existence and this will make your brand more recognizable and also raise awareness’s about your business.

High return on investment – An optimized website for local search can generate more value to a business since all they want is to get customers searching the web for businesses in their area. This generates a high return on the investment made and potential higher growth than companies who don’t take advantage of this.

Local SEO is for searches in a specific geo location while SEO practices are applicable for global wide searches. It should be noted that all SEO advice either about on-page or off-page SEO are applicable for local as well. The difference is that for local you also need to make sure that you provide more signals to Google, as we will see in the checklist below.

Also, if you are searching from mobile or if you allowed Google to track your location when searching from Desktop, you don’t have to type a location in your search string because Google already knows where you are located.

No and the reason is that if you try to target users in a particular area, it will be more difficult to rank for keywords that are related to global search. Take for example my case with reliablesoft.net. We have clients from all over the World and since we want to rank for more general terms we do not give any local signals to search engines, other than those we need to give to our users for business clarity and trust.

We have talked about the importance and benefits of local SEO to businesses but we have not yet come to the most important part of this post i.e. what you have to do in order to optimize your website for local search. The local SEO checklist below has all the information you need to get started.

1. Optimize your logo – One of the first things that search engines encounter when crawling your website is the logo image and this is also a good place to start your local SEO optimization. There is a detail post about logo optimization by Chris Silver Smith on searchengineland but the most important points are outlined below:

Make sure that your image filename is descriptive. Instead of using logo.png better use a more meaningful description like ‘Mayers-dental-surgeons-logo.png’ALT text is important for all images but more important for the logo. You can use the ALT text to give more details about the image and in this case the location of your business. For example you can use ‘Mayers Dental Surgeons, Florida’ as the ALT text. As already explained in my SEO Tips article, you can use keywords in the ALT text but don’t overdo it.Add the location in the title tag of the link. For example

25 Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

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Email is not dead, actually it is still one of the best ways to find new customers, make more sales or create a tribe of loyal followers. Small businesses either operating online or offline have a lot to gain form email marketing but yet many of them ignore it losing many opportunities.

Whether you are running an online shop, blog or services website, email is a great way to stay in touch with your current customers and one of the most efficient ways to convert potential customers to customers.

Many people believe that the growing use of social media altered the role of email as a powerful marketing tool but this is far from truth. Recent email marketing statistics (July 2013) indicate that:

44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email.

7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week.

56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013

For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. 

The core of every email marketing campaign is the email list and having a quality email list can make the difference when it comes to conversions and return from your campaign. Growing your email list takes time and effort and the following tips will help you do it correctly.

1. Give them different options – Make it easy to register

This is the first and perhaps one of the most important steps. You need to make it easy for people to register to your list. No need to ask for too much information (a name and email is enough) or to have long and cluttered registration forms.

Try to make it ‘single click’ i.e. people enter their name and email in the registration box and they click ‘Register’. Once they confirm their email, they are on your list.

If you want to take it a step further you can also allow people to register to your email list using their social media accounts. It’s easier for them and you also get to connect with them on social media as well.

2. Offer incentives – Why should someone register on your list?

Why should someone give you their email address, what is the benefit for them? Make sure that the benefit is shown clearly in the registration form/box. Are you going to help them with something, do they get free ebooks, discounts for their next purchase, coupons etc?

3. Position of the registration box does matter

Where you place the email registration box affects the number of people that will register on your list. Best practices include having the registration box:

Above the fold (i.e. in the part of the page that is visible without scrolling)

Top right sidebar – if are using sidebars then the top right is ideal for the email registration box

At the bottom of your articles – if someone reads your articles till the end then most probably they like what they are reading and are more likely to want to read more from you.

Footer – Another high converting place for email sign-ups is the footer. This is especially true for online shops and websites that have pages and not posts

Homepage top – Many popular websites and marketers use this method to get more email subscribers. Having the sign up form on the top of your homepage will generate more signups.

4. Give them info about what to expect and when

Tell your subscribers what kind of information to expect from you (new posts, infographics, coupons, offers, etc) and when (every day, every week, whenever you have a new post etc.). Be honest and try not to promise something you cannot deliver otherwise your email marketing efforts will fail.

5. Make it personal – Customize your messages

When you use a software or vendor to send out the emails spend some time and customize the messages that go out with each email. Try to make the registration process easy and inform the users what is happening at each stage. For example once they enter their name and email the first time, let them know that they need to confirm their email address in order to finalize the registration.

6. Make the text easy to read and scan and use alt tags for images

Don’t expect that people will read your email every time or that they are willing to spend too much time on it. The best practice is to assume that you have a couple of seconds to grab their attention (from the time they see the email) so work on your titles and the formatting of your email to make it easy to read but also scan.

Use headings and small paragraphs and if you decide to use images make sure that you also set the ALT tag since most email clients do not show images by default.

7. Use social media as the medium to get more email subscribers

Your website is not the only medium to increase your email subscribers. You can use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and any other social network you are using to get more emails. Don’t be afraid to ask your followers to register on your list but don’t forget to also explain the benefits from doing so.

8. Don’t overdo it and don’t break your promises

Sending our more emails than promised will not necessarily generate better results. If you promised to send one email per week then do not start sending more but create a weekly digest instead. You can give them options to change their subscription preferences and get more emails from you but don’t break your initial promises.

9. Send them the info they need to read in the email

Yes emails are a great way to get more visitors to your website but when running an email marketing campaign to increase sales, you primary target is to achieve more conversions and not more visits.

For example let’s assume that you are selling online courses and you run an email marketing campaign using the targeted list from your blog. In the email you send out make sure that the subscriber can read everything they need about the course within the email and they only need to go to the website to make a purchase or read more reviews or further details.

10. Most emails are read on mobile

It’s no surprise that:

43% of emails are read over mobile devices and this is expected to rise to more than 50% by the end of 2013!

39% of marketers have no strategy for mobile email

The above statistics show two important things, first is that your emails should be mobile friendly and second that you need to have a mobile strategy. So, before finalizing your next email campaign make sure that it is tested against all major mobile devices (you can use mobile emulators to see how the email looks on different devices).

11. Monitor results and take corrective actions

Whether you are running an SEO campaign, social media marketing or email marketing campaign it is important not to ‘set it and forget it’ but to run it, monitor the results (email open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate etc.), take corrective actions and run it again.

This is a continuous process until you get the desired results. As you get more experienced you can also do market segmentations and pre-pilot and pilot phases but in the majority of the cases what is important is to perform some basic monitoring and control.

12. Keep an eye on your competitors

Register on your competitors email list and see what techniques they are using, what kind of emails they send out, how often, what kind of products they promote etc. Your intention is not to copy or mimic your competitor’s practices but to make sure that you are ahead of them.

13. Make it easy to unsubscribe

Don’t try to hide the unsubscribe button believing that this will keep someone on your list. It’s better to have them unsubscribed rather than have you on their spam list.

14. Create a content marketing strategy for your email marketing campaigns

You should clear out some basic concepts about marketing strategies. Content marketing is not the same as social media marketing and certainly not the same as an email marketing. On the contrary your email marketing campaign needs to have a content marketing strategy i.e. what type of content to deliver by email and when to deliver it.

In simple words make a plan on what type content you will send out in the next few months and ensure that it has a purpose and meaning, you can also use some of the content marketing tips to make your content more interesting for your subscribers.

15. Use email to make cross selling and up selling

If you haven’t already registered with Amazon.com, make sure that you do so and watch what they are doing with their email marketing strategies. When you view a product on amazon you will receive an email in a few days with similar suggestions and when you buy a product you will receive an email with more products to buy.

Maybe you don’t have the means to do this kind of analysis but if you get to know your list better, you will also understand your customers and niche.

16. Include your social media profiles in the email as well

I already mentioned that you should use social media to grow your email list, but you should also use your newsletters as a way to grow your social media profiles as well. The simplest and most effective way is to add the social media buttons in your newsletter so that your subscribers can share the content but also connect with you in the various social networks.

Besides that above tips that will help you increase your subscriber count, you can also learn from the mistakes of others and get better results by avoiding these common mistakes made by small business owners.

17. Not having an email list in the first place

This is silly to even say it but the first email marketing mistake is not having a list in the first place! There is absolutely no excuse for not maintaining an email list for your online business or website.

If you are reading this and have no email subscriber list yet, you now know the first thing you should do after you read this article.

18. Having a list but not sending out newsletters

Second mistake, it to keep a list and gather customer emails but never send them a newsletter or email. This is perhaps the most common mistake I’ve seen all these years and the excuse is always the same: “We were planning to send out a newsletter but never made it”.

There are no excuses, you have many benefits to gain from communicating with your customers or readers and if you can’t do it hire someone to do it for you.

19. Not offering incentives for signups

If you have a content driven website the incentive to signup is the content itself but if you are selling goods or services then you may need to give some incentives (i.e. discounts, special deals) for someone to sign-up.

Not taking the time to think about incentives and others ways to increase your email list is a major reason for not getting a good return from your investment.

20. Buying emails from other sources

Shortcuts do not bring results – this is true for almost all online activities. If you think that you can have success by purchasing emails from some site on the Internet then you are wrong. Try to grow your email list naturally and using white hat techniques and don’t get into troubles by buying email lists or false hopes.

21. Not asking for email verification

It’s an extra step but what is important for email marketing success is the quality of your email list and not the quantity. Better ask for email verification and get less subscribers rather than not using verification and be loaded with inactive email accounts.

22. Not following best practices for sending out the emails

When you want to send bulk emails you need to follow best standards and practices otherwise you will be considered a spammer.

For example you need to have your address in the email together with an unsubscribe button, you need to remind subscribers where you got their email address and you need to send both an HTML and text only version. These are just some examples, your email vendor should be able to guide you through the process.

23. Don’t use a vendor for sending bulk emails

It’s a mistake to try and send emails without using a vendor. Many people think that they can use outlook or Gmail to send bulk emails but this is far from recommended. As explained above there are many risks involved and it’s better to use a pro service that will protect you from making mistakes. Most email marketing companies have free packages for small businesses so cost is not an issue.

24. Not doing A/B testing

An email marketing campaign is far from static. Besides monitoring the performance you should also make several tests and find out which of them produce better results. A few examples of tests you can perform:

Time to send emails – What time/date converts better

Position of the signup box – What position of the sign-up box brings in more subscribers

Type of emails – Do plain emails perform better than emails with more text, headings, images etc.

Subject titles – Which titles have the bigger open rates (long titles vs short titles etc)

Use of images – When you use images in the email does it produce more clicks?

25. Not asking users to add you to their contact list

Last but not least, it is not bad to ask from your subscribers to add you to their contact list. This will ensure that your emails will not be considered as spam and you increase the number of people that receive your emails.

According to a statistic there are over 3.6 billion email accounts in 2013. Almost everyone online has an email address and it is still one of the most effective ways to contact and engage with your customers. Small businesses MUST have an email marketing strategy and take advantage of the many benefits a successful campaign has to offer.

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About the author

Alex has more than 12 years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. He studied Computing and eCommerce and the last 5 years he is making a living on-line. You can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

5 online marketing strategies for small businesses that work

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Online marketing strategies are no different than traditional marketing strategies when it comes to goals and purpose. Both types aim to increase brand awareness and find more customers for the particular company.

Online marketing or digital marketing as it is more widely known, has a number of components that cover every aspect of online promotion from content creation to delivery and sales. These components can be combined together and form 5 basic strategies that can be used by any type of online business to get more traffic and customers online.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the first online marketing strategy you can use and it has two major components. First is SEO (Search engine optimization) and second is PSA (Paid Search Advertising). In simple words SEO will help you get more organic visits from search engines for free while PSA can get you visits from search traffic but you will have to pay for them.

What is your goal with SEM? Your goal with SEM is clear: get more visits from search engines either from organic search or through carefully designed and targeted PPC campaigns.

How: To get more visits from search engines you need to make sure that your website is optimized for search. Things like your page titles, descriptions, web page speed, Google authorship, design and structure, incoming links, content freshness, ALT text for images and many more are important.

Tools: There are many SEO guidelines you can follow and although each rule is important on its own, if you apply a number of rules together, that would produce better results.  You can use these 2 articles (5 on page SEO techniques and SEO tips for beginners) to guide you through the process and once you are done, you can perform an SEO Audit of your website to ensure that it is in good shape before continuing with the rest of the online marketing strategies.

Tip: When you make changes to your website to improve SEO, these changes will not be immediately taken into account by Google or other search engines. You have to be patient and monitor your pages for improvements in their ranking through google webmaster tools (search queries report).

Normally after search engine marketing you can expect to find social media marketing or content marketing as the next online marketing strategy for small businesses but the increase in the number of mobile searches raises the importance of mobile marketing. As stated by Google, mobile marketing isn’t an option but it’s an imperative for every business. Some recent statistics about mobile usage re-enforce this statement:

 

What is your goal with mobile marketing? To provide your users with the best possible experience when browsing your website using their mobile devices.

How: How can you achieve the ‘best possible experience’? First you need to make sure that your website looks good and usable when viewed through a mobile browser i.e. you need to have a mobile friendly version of your website. Second, you can also offer your users native apps to download (from the itunes store, Google play, amazon store, windows store) and install on their devices.

Tools: If you are using wordpress you can easily create a mobile friendly version by either changing to a responsive theme or by using a plugin. I am using wp-touch pro on this website and I am very happy with the results.

If you are not using wordpress you can use services like dudamobile or conduit to create mobile friendly versions of your website.

Make sure that you understand the difference between a mobile friendly version of your website and a native app. A native app is different than a mobile website and you need to hire a mobile developer to build an application for the specific platform.  For example if you want to create an application for your website and have this application published on the Apple Store then you need to hire an apple developer to code the application and prepare it for submission to itunes.

Hint: We also offer mobile development services at very competitive prices so contact us to discuss your next mobile project together.

Content marketing is the heart of every digital marketing campaign. Once you have a good foundation (that’s search engine marketing) and a good delivery platform that can cover all your user needs (that’s mobile marketing) then the next step is to take all actions needed to create content that rocks!

Content is what will create loyal visitors, comments, social media shares and most important of all sales.

What is your goal with content marketing? To put it simply, your goal is to create high quality content that your readers want to read and try to convince readers to become customers or execute a call-to-action process (register to a newsletter, follow on social media, vote for a poll etc.).

How: Before even creating content, whether it is an article, a video, a table or image, try to think how that particular content will benefit your readers or customers. Don’t just create and publish content for the sake of keeping a publishing schedule or to satisfy your desire to have something to publish.

In the past this technique of publishing mass amounts of content to trick search engines used to work but not anymore. It is more important to have less published pages but with good content rather than lots of published pages with low quality content.

Social media marketing is naturally the next marketing strategy for your business. You managed to have in your hands great content (from the previous strategy) so now it’s time to spread the word out and the best way to do that is through a well-designed social media marketing strategy.

What is your goal with social media marketing?  Your social media campaigns should serve two purposes. First is to gain as many targeted followers so that your content and brand gets as much attention possible and second to get visits from social networks that will eventually convert into customers.

How: You need to establish a good presence in all major social networks (Facebook, google+, twitter, Pinterest) by sharing useful related content on a regular basis and by engaging with people interested in your website, products or brand. Have a look at these 3 articles to get started: 10 social media marketing tips for beginners, social media mistakes to avoid, how to get more followers on facebook.

I know that it’s not an easy process to follow and it is rather time consuming to run campaigns on many networks at the same time but this is how online marketing works for small businesses these days and you have to do it too.

The good news is that social media traffic does convert (despite the initial believes a few years back that visitors from social media don’t become customers) and if you don’t have the time or knowledge to manage your social media presence, there are professionals (see our seo packages for small business for more details) that can do it for you.

Since we are talking about small businesses, I thought that it is more appropriate to have local SEO listed as a separate strategy because it is very important for them. Local SEO is a must for every company that has a physical address. Whether you are a doctor or florist, a mechanic or retailer, local seo can help you find more customers online.

What is your goal from local seo? The goal from local seo is more than clear: to get high rankings for searches related to your area. When people search for long tail keywords with the addition of location in the query (for example: “divorce lawyers in las vegas”) you want your website to be listed in the top positions.

How: There is no straightforward answer for that, as with any other SEO related question. What you can do is follow Google seo best practices to ensure that Google will not penalize you for trying to cheat on their algorithm and optimize your website for local SEO.

While the 5 online marketing strategies explained above are great and can generate fantastic results, you need to also think outside of the box for even better results. For example besides search engines, mobiles and social media what are some other ways to increase traffic coming to your small business website? To be more precise here are some ideas that worked for some of my clients:

Chrome web store: Registering your website as a web app in the chrome store can generate an additional flow of quality traffic coming to your site. I have used this method many times and the results are very good.

Slideshare.net: For some niches slideshare is a great way to get traffic or even leads.

Direct Advertising on other websites: Besides running PPC campaigns on Adwords and Facebook you can also try to ‘rent’ advertising space per month or other related websites. You can easily find related websites in your niche that offer advertising and contact the webmasters directly and ask for their rates. It will cost you less than PPC and with proper tracking you can evaluate the results and ROI.

Guest posting on high traffic websites: Guest posting for traffic (and not for links) is a good way to increase your online reputation but also gain traffic from other websites. If the website you are guest posting on has a good social media presence then the benefits are even more.

Small businesses can succeed online if they follow proven techniques and practices. When you build your website the first thing that you should look at is search engine optimization. Once you get this right then you need to enhance your delivery channels by going mobile. After that you need to revisit your content strategy and ensure that you have content that matters and makes sense. Next in line is social media marketing that will help you to push your content to the world.

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Long tail SEO benefits for website owners

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Long tail SEO has many benefits to offer to website owners. Whether you are running an online shop, a content driven website, a blog or your company’s website, long tail SEO can help you get more organic traffic and more targeted customers.

Beginners to SEO may have troubles understanding what exactly long tail keywords are so it’s better to start by first explaining what we mean by long tail keywords and long tail SEO.

I remember reading about this 6-7 years ago; a lot of experts during that period talked about how you could make money fast by creating lots of posts targeting long tail keywords related to your niche.

Content quality was not at issue at that time, it was more important to keyword stuff your tittle and copy with instances of the long tail keywords and if you could throw a couple of links as well to the pages, you got yourself first ranking positions and the traffic started flowing in.

Despite the irony in my previous comment, the above method did work just fine and many bloggers and even companies made a fortune from it. Demand Media is a good example of a company who was running websites like livestrong that had pages of every keyword you could search for related to health, fitness and weight loss. About.com and ehow.com are a couple of more examples to understand better what I mean.

What are long tail keywords?

I will explain what we mean by long tail keywords by using some of my favourite keywords.

Let’s take for example the keyword “weight loss”. This is a very popular keyword and according to the Google keyword planner (previously the Google keyword tool) it has more than 250,000 exact keyword searches per month. It is also a high competitive keyword both in terms of advertising with Pay Per Click ads and for ranking for this term high in the search results.

If you search for this term on Google.com you will find in the first positions websites like webmd.com, Wikipedia.org and mayoclinic.com which are almost impossible to out rank with a normal website or blog.

So if it is impossible to rank for “weight loss” what is the next step? You go one step further by adding tail or tails to the existing keyword so as to narrow down your competition.

If you add the word ‘tips’ your keyword now becomes “weight loss tips” but it is still very difficult to target. According to keyword planner it is a high competition keyword and the first places in Google are occupied by highly trusted websites.

So what do you do? Add another word and it becomes “weight loss tips for men”. Looking for this term in the keyword planner you will notice that the competition is now ‘medium’ with not so big websites in the first position but it is still not good since what we want is ‘low’ competition keywords which are easier to target for ‘normal’ blogs or websites.

Changing the word ‘men’ with ‘teenagers’ so that our long tail keyword becomes “weight loss tips for teenagers” makes it a low competition keyword possible to target. Certainly the number of people searching for this keyword per month are a lot less compared to “weight loss” and “weight loss tips” but the benefits gained from ranking long tail keywords are much more than the traffic difference.

You also read another example of finding long tail keywords by reading my previous post: how to choose post titles

What is long tail SEO?

If this is not clear by now, long tail SEO is just a term that describes the process of trying to get more organic visits by targeting long tail keywords.

Easier to rank compared to non-long tail keywords – Provided that you are having a high quality web site long tail keywords are easier to rank especially if you choose low competition keywords.

More targeted visits – If you think about it for a second, those users that use long tail keywords to search for something can be considered more targeted because they already made the effort to make their search terms more specific. If we are talking about ‘buying’ or ‘action’ keywords then those are more likely to convert or perform an action.

Consider the following example:

“Cars” <- General search

“used cars for sale” <- looking for used cars

“used cars for sale in florida” <- looking for used cars in florida

“used ford focus for sale in florida” <-looking for used ford focus cards in florida

Help you build website authority and trust – Having a first page placement of any keyword is an indication of website authority and trust. One of the ways to get your website prepared to target more important keywords is to get as many first placements as you can for long tail keywords.

Of course this is not the only factor that will help you build authority but a number of first place placements together with good SEO can work towards that direction.

You will get more traffic than what the keyword planner is suggesting – The keyword planner and other tools have estimates about the traffic you can get if you have a place in one of the top positions but many times their estimates are not correct especially for long tail keywords. This is because the volume for long tail keywords is low and so is their sampling so they under-estimate. I have many examples of long tail keywords that bring in 10 times the traffic shown by the keyword tool so never reject a keyword because the traffic in the tools is low.

Now that you are convinced that long tail keywords are important, let’s see how you can find long tail keywords for your niche.

Google Keyword Planner: The Google keyword planner is your starting point. You can use it to try different keyword ideas and find those low competition keywords to target. One nice feature I have seen in the keyword planner and don’t remember seeing this in the old keyword tool is the option to search keywords by competition. Under keyword filters (on the left) you can select to show only keywords that have low competition.

 

Google search box suggestions: Another great way is to start typing keywords in the google search box and see the ideas suggested by Google. When you find a nice long tail keyword you can check it with the keyword tool and decide if it is worth targeting or not.

Bing / Yahoo suggest: Bing and Yahoo also make suggestions as you are typing a search term. You can use that as well since in almost all cases the suggestions made are different from Google so it’s worth exploiting.

Competition analysis:  There is no niche without competition so it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what your competitors are doing in term of long tail keyword targeting. Register to their newsletter and RSS feed and if you like a keyword they have used, check it with the keyword planner and see if there are any variations or similar keywords you can target.

To avoid any confusion, competition analysis does not mean copying your competitor’s ideas or stealing their work but simply means keeping an eye on what other websites in your niche are doing.

I have said above that long tail keywords are easier to rank but that does not mean that you just throw text on a page and it will get a top position because it is a low competition long tail keyword.

You need to do a lot more than that in you want to rank in Google or any other search engine.

Content still matters: Content not only matters but it’s the most important factor for achieving and maintaining a good ranking in the long term. Make sure that your content rocks both in quantity but most importantly in quality. Use proven content marketing techniques and try to publish content that answers the question in the long tail.

Copywriting tips: When writing content you should follow some simple but yet every effective SEO copywriting tips for making your copy friendlier to search engines and users. Thinks like post titles, content freshness and formatting do matter and once you learn the basics they are very easy to follow.

On-page SEO is a must: Don’t forget the rest of the on-page SEO factors that can help you achieve better rankings. Besides the keywords and content there are other ways to make your website more attractive to search engines.

Promote, Promote, Promote: When you hit the publish button you don’t sit back and relax but you start promoting your content in social media and using other white hat techniques.

For new websites or for not so big websites there is no other way to get traffic and good rankings than working with long tail keywords. The competition for high volume keywords is so huge and it is very difficult to win one of the top positions.

The best way to start building a strong website is to provide top quality content for long tail keywords consistently so as to start gaining rankings and traffic and then gradually move on to more general terms and establish your presence.

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Difference between social media marketing and content marketing

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What is the difference between social media marketing and content marketing and why you need both if you want to succeed online?

Many beginners to Internet marketing tend to confuse social media marketing with content marketing and my goal with this post is to help you understand the difference between the two and how you can use them for your benefit.

As you can see in the image below, both social media marketing and content marketing are under the umbrella of Internet Marketing which is one of the most important components of digital marketing.

So, the first difference between the two is that they are not the same thing. They are two distinct tools online marketers can use to promote their brand, products or services online.

 

In its simplest form social media marketing is the marketing process for promoting products or services in the different social networks either in the form of ads or in the form of content. The goals of a social media marketing campaign can be the same as any other marketing campaign i.e. to increase sales or can be more specific to social networks i.e. to increase Facebook followers or to get more tweets etc.

Who needs social media marketing?

Social media marketing is for everyone working either online or offline. By everyone I mean:

Bloggers or webmasters running blogs or websitesSmall businesses owners who run online businessesBusiness owners who run offline businesses

The impact social networks have on our lives is so huge that you just cannot ignore it. In the case that you do ignore it and stay out, your competitors will take advantage of it and the impact on your businesses will be greater.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

In a nutshell the benefits of social media marketing are:

Increase brand awarenessFind more customersStay in front of the competitionStay in synch with the latest marketing trendsEngage with your customersProvide another way for potential customers to contact youInform your customers of changes to your products or servicesGradually build a tribe of loyal followers

How do you create a social media marketing campaign?

You can read my previous post, social media marketing tips for beginners for a more in-depth analysis but for the purpose of this post, let’s examine the basic components of a social media marketing campaign.

Decide on your goals – what are your goals from running a social media marketing campaign, what do you want to achieve? Hint: If you’re goals are increase in sales make sure that you track leads coming from social media so that you know if they convert or not.

Decide on the duration – A campaign cannot run forever so it’s important to decide the period you will run your campaign. Hint: Run your campaign for at least a week since not all days are the same in terms of traffic and social media usage.

Set your budget – How much money you want to spend on social media advertising? Hint: You don’t always have to pay for advertising but as we will see below you can run your social media campaigns using the content you have created.

Choose your social media networks – There are so many social networks available and if you try to run campaigns on all at the same time you will get lost in the process. It is better to concentrate on one social network at a time and at the end you can evaluate the results and see which networks converts better. Hint: If you don’t know which is the best network for your niche then why not take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they are spending time and money on a particular network maybe they are getting good results.

Evaluate the results – Everything on the web is measurable so at the end of your social media marketing campaign check the results and calculate the ROI. If the return is not what you expected may you should run the campaign on a different social network or assign the task to professionals to optimize your campaign and produce better results.

Make sure that you also avoid these 15 social media mistakes.

Content marketing is the process of creating the right type of content to fit for the particular purpose. Have a look at the examples below to understand how content marketing can be used in different situations:

Service company (lawyers, accounts etc)Text content: (description of the services offered, articles related to the niche)Images: map to the company offices, organizational structureRetail business selling products online or offlineText content (product descriptions)Images (product images)Videos (product videos)Text content: articles, how-to posts etcImagesVideos

Infographics

What is quality content?

In order for content marketing to be successful you first need to have quality content. Many marketers talk about the importance of quality content but a few people understand what this means. In my view quality content has the following characteristics:

It is detail – provides all the info about the particular subjectIt is un-biased – provides for both sides of a story and it’s not one-sidedIt is shareable – people like it and want to share it in their social networksPeople read it / watch it / hear it – statistics show that people spend time with the contentPeople engage with it – they write comments, add to their favorites etc.

What are the benefits from content marketing?

The benefits gained from content marketing are the same with social media marketing. Your ultimate goal with content marketing is to provide top quality content to your users or potential customers so that you increase sales, increase brand awareness, get to know your users better and stay in front of the competition.

Is content marketing the new SEO?

A popular phrase in the SEO industry the last couple of months is whether content marketing is the new SEO. The reason that made many people believe this statement is the fact that with the latest changes Google made to their ranking algorithms they gave more importance to high quality content websites and it was a clear signal that content is once more a very important ranking factor.

I would say that content is not the new SEO but high quality content with social media marketing is the new SEO. As I mentioned above content alone will do any good but high quality content can bring success especially if combined with a well-defined social media marketing campaign.

Anyone should have clear in their minds the difference between social media marketing and content marketing. Social media marketing is about promotion and content marketing is about creation.

The two can work together in harmony and can generate fantastic results in today’s competitive market. Companies or websites who can create top quality content and have a proper social media presence are more likely to succeed and expand than companies who failed in this area.

Some real life examples from different industries:

Web / Content producers: Sparkpeople.com – They create content on a daily basis about healthy living and they promote their content on social media. Visit their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/SparkPeople

Manufacturing / Retailers: Nike.com – They create content to promote their products and they engage with their customers on social media. https://www.facebook.com/nike

Manufacturing / Retailers: Coca-Cola – They use content marketing and social media to promote their ‘change the world’ campaigns. https://www.facebook.com/cocacola

Service / Software: Firefox.com – content marketing and social media for creating a community of users. https://www.facebook.com/Firefox

Blogging: Read our case study on how to build a successful blog with content marketing and social media.

Content marketing is the starting point of all your internet marketing campaigns. Whether you are a small business looking for more customers or a webmaster looking for more visitors to your website you need to start with content marketing.

Your next step is social media marketing. In many areas social media marketing has replaced traditional link building and is the number one way to promote your website or brand online.

If you can do both well, then you just found the secret for marketing online in the 21 century.