What is Internet Marketing?

Posted on by
Reply

Internet Marketing is a buzzword thrown around today like an old basket ball. It’s important if you have a business website to understand the basics so that you can score three pointers on your competitors.

Essentially it is any activity performed online that promote your product or service.

Here is a list of the top most critical Internet Marketing Activities:

  1. Search Engine Optimisation: You have to ensure that your website has the correct keywords embedded within it to have a chance of being shown on the search engine results page.
  2. Google Pay Per Click Advertising or Google Adwords: Using Google Keyword Research you can pay for your site to appear on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Be careful here as you can pay a fortune for ads that aren’t optimised and remember to ditch terms that aren’t giving you a return. These ads can also appear on websites that use Google Adsense.
  3. Facebook Pay Per Click Advertising: Facebook advertising is very exciting for certain businesses as you can target customers by age, location, sex etc. It can be expensive but if you get a customer to join your facebook page you have access to them potentially indefinitely.
  4. Affiliate Marketing: Often there’s a website out there that provides information to your target market. It might be worth offering them a percentage of your profit if they can generate significant sales for you. There are many third party services that link affiliates with merchants such as TradeDoubler. If it’s a niche you could update your site to track who has generated sales for you.
  5. Social Media interaction: It is important to engage with your consumers in a non-salesy way so that they learn to trust you. Building up this kind of relationsip will influence a customer when it comes to future purchase decisions.
  6. Add facebook like button to your site: If people like what you’re offering they may well share it on facebook if you make it easy for them to do it.
  7. Google Places: Don’t forget to add your site to Google Places otherwise know as Google Local Business Centre. When people do local searches these results often do better than regular SERP entries.

There are lots more things that you can do to market your product or service online. This is just a taster of some of the more important Internet Marketing techniques that I use on a daily basis.

 

Should I add a Facebook like button to my website?

Posted on by
Reply

Short answer: Err… Yeah!

Adding a facebook like button could be the single best thing you do to your website this year. There are hundreds of millions of people using facebook today, and over 1.5 million active Facebook users in Ireland, hundreds of thousands using the mobile version on iPhones and Android based phones.

It’s a relatively simple thing to add to a site, you can add it to your homepage or to every page on your site depending on the content management system used.

Once you’ve added it, end users can like or recommend your page, which means that your page will appear on their facebook profile and can even appear on their friends’ walls.  This is a truly viral way of spreading the word about a web page.

The beauty of it is that if a page is likable, it will naturally spread. On slang.ie I added the like button to all slang entries and some entries have received 10s of thousands of likes and shares, significantly increasing traffic to the site.

I recently added a facebook like button to http://www.hartleypeople.com and it has already received many likes from the local community.

A facebook like button should not be confused with a like box.  A like button is a small button that appears  somewhere on a webpage that allows logged in facebook users to like a page. It will also show how many others like that page too.  A facebook like box however shows facebook posts embedded on a webpage.  On the Hartley People site you will see a facebook like button on the top of the content on the home page and on the bottom right you will see a like box.

Top 5 SEO Tips for 2011

Posted on by
1

Here are my top 5 SEO tips for 2011.

  1. Get a Clear Picture: The very first thing anyone performing SEO should do is get a clear picture of the current situation. The best way to do this is by installing Google Analytics.  After running Analytics for a month you will see some patterns emerging and you can determine how much traffic is coming from search engines.
  2. Filter out seasonal trends: There’s no way you can identify gains and losses unless you figure out the seasonal trends.  You can use a tool such as google trends to do this if you do not have your own data.
  3. Find Opportunities: As with any marketing exercise you need to determine if there is a market.  You need to identify the key phrases that people will use to find your site, but there’s no point in doing this if there is huge competition.  Find the best keyphrase volume you can that has poor returns on the search results page and target that.
  4. Apply Research Effectively: Once you have the keyphrases identified using tip 3, apply the keyphrase to your site naturally in key areas such as titles, headings, links and body text. Don’t over do it. Find out how many times your competitors use it. As always it is no harm to build links to pages.
  5. Measure Results: Using analytics, measure how many hits these keyphrases are generating for you as a percentage against your search engine results position. Tweak your page slightly each month to see if it positively or negatively affects your position. Link building may also affect your position positive and should be an ongoing task.

That’s it.  The basics are simple enough, do them right and you can’t go too far wrong.  It’s that final 20% that’s the most painstaking and most difficult.  Keep at it and you will get ahead of most of your competitors within a realistic time frame.

What’s the difference between a Facebook User, Page and Group

Posted on by
Reply

When I meet a client and they ask me ‘Can I have more than 5000 friends on Facebook?’ it’s horrible to see the look on their faces when I say no to them.

With Facebook if you are likely to reach more than 5000 people you need to set up a page or group.

If you want to promote something that potentially has lots of ‘fans’ or more accurately ‘likes’ then you need to set up a page.  Some good examples here are products, companies, causes, celebrities etc.

The down site with pages is that you cannot message all your subscribers directly.  In order to reach them you must post interesting content that others will like and interact with.  The more interactions the more people will see it.  Should the post be deemed interesting by facebook it will appear on subscribers walls.

With a Groups, you  can message all of your contacts.  With a regular user account you must select members individually to message.  With groups you can message everyone, which is very useful. Groups are very useful for committees and clubs that need to message the entire group through email. Groups are also useful for inviting people to events.

Essentially, everyone needs a personal facebook user account as their control centre.  You can then set up multiple facebook pages and groups depending on your requirements.

My advice is set up a page for your subscribers unless you have the specific requirement to message all of your members on a regular basis.

Why should I set up a Blog?

Posted on by
Reply

There are various reasons why you should set up a blog, maybe you have thoughts in your head that you just want to share with the world, maybe you  are the public relations officer for a group and you want to disseminate information, maybe you are a story teller or an amateur reporter who wants to comment on topics relevant to the world today.  These are all valid reasons for setting up a blog but the no 1 reason people should set up blogs in the business community is to help them generate revenue, be it directly through advertising products on the blog itself or by indirectly advertising their own products or services through friendly advice. For example this blog, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that this blog was set up to help me promote my business.

So how can blogs help you earn money?

A regularly updated, well constructed blog will be monitored by Google and other search engines, therefore every blog entry you write has the opportunity to capture more visitors to your site. It is therefore important that the title of your blog and the content in the first paragraph and throughout the entry targets the keyphrase that you know users are searching for.  For example this particular blog entry is called “Why should I set up a blog?” If we look at the Google Keyword tool, 18,100 people each month search for “set up a blog” which is contained within the title of this blog.  This means that if someone types in “Set up a blog” into google it could potentially match this page.  Of course other factors such as page popularity, region etc. come into play but the potential is there.

The great thing about blogs is that you can endlessly post pages to your site, unlike on your business website, which displays your products and services.  There’s no way that you can cover every topic that someone might type in to search for your products and services on your business website, it would just get too messy and customers would not enjoy the experience.  Your company site is about converting traffic into business. Your blog on the other hand and delve down into very specific issues and can have a personal touch.  People reading blogs are looking for the solution to a problem or a author’s opinion on something so when you are constructing your blog think firstly, what would a user search for and then solve or comment on that problem. You should look at the Google Keyword tool to help you make that judgement.  Once you have your topic and the correct keywords write your blog naturally and just make sure you mention your key phrase once or twice throughout. Your new blog entry then essentially becomes a lead for your business.

What you are trying to achieve is to get new visitors to your site based on long tail key phrases.  These are key phrases that consist of several words that further qualify a key phrase e.g. “Cars in Waterford” could be a considered a relatively generic search term, whereas “Honda Civic Cars Waterford” is much more specific or long tail.  Long tail phrases may get you less traffic on their own but combined over time they will lead to significant, and more importantly, more focused traffic to your site. In other words, if a potential lead is typing in a very specific search phrase and their search turns up your site, they are likely to have found what they are looking for. It’s about casting your fishing net further, wider and more accurately than your company website ever can.

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia regarding long tail keywords:

” These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating.”

“Comprehensive long-tail keyword research can be a highly effective strategy, since people making long-tail searches are arguably further along in the buying cycle, so conversion rates can be higher. Recent long-tail keyword research has found that long-tail searches often exhibit a higher conversion rate by up to 200% compared to short-tail keywords, and can be extremely profitable for search engine marketers in terms of a lower cost per action and higher return on investment.”

If a blog entry is good it may be linked to or tracked by the blog community or commented on which is the ideal situation (this means it is being read).  Sometimes you will hit the jackpot and get tonnes of visits, other times you will see nothing but tumbleweed blow across the screen.  Over time if you consistently blog, it will average out as more visits to your site each month so once you start blogging, make sure you keep blogging!!!

How do I set up a blog?

There are a number of ways of doing this. You can host the blog on your own server or you can use an online blog service.  WordPress is probably the best known blog software in the world and you have both options here.  You can set up a blog on their server and you might get a domain such as yourbusiness.wordpress.com or you can download wordpress from wordpress.org and install it on your own server (you might need a web developer/designer to help you with this).  There are other online blog solutions such as blogger and livejournal. One advantage of using a hosted service is that you get a free link back to your main domain which will help your SEO.

So that’s pretty much it really, set up that business blog and start telling your customers what they want to hear through sensible advice and providing potential solutions to problems they might have. Oh and at the bottom of each blog entry you could also end with a gentle ad for your business.

E.g. for more information on setting up blogs or if you need a blog set up and managed for you please contact info@utdwebdesign.com

;-)

Div float problem in Firefox – Background content not automatically resizing

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had this problem several times and each time it catches me out so this time I’m blogging about it so I don’t forget myself. Sometimes designers need to arrange divs into columns whilst allowing the page to grow vertically based on content in these columns.

A problem can happen in Firefox when divs are floated left and right, which is not an error in rendering it must be said but a problem that comes from an expected behaviour.

Sometimes when you float divs the containing element does not automatically resize with the expanding inner divs. This is because the divs are outside the normal flow of the document and the browser tries to float text around these divs.

To fix it is simple however,

Basically what I do is create an outer div called container. Within this container I place the two floating divs and finally I place a div at the bottom of these to clear the floats.

Here’s the code, hope it helps someone out there:

<div style="width: 800px" >
<div style="float: left; width: 480px; margin-right: 40px">Left Content</div>
<div style="float: right; width: 280px">Right Content</div>
<div style="clear:both">&nbsp;</div>
</div>

Make Submit Button an Image (HTML FORM)

Posted on by
Reply

Often you might want to replace the standard sumbit button on a html form with an image.

This is a very simple thing to do.

Instead of:

<input name="submit" type="submit" value="submit" />

insert:

<input alt="Search Button" src="image.jpg" type="image" />

Here is an example of such a form:

<form method="POST">
<input name="searchtext" type="text" />
<input alt="Search Button" src="search.jpg" type="image" />
</form>

Why should I advertise on Facebook as opposed to Google?

Posted on by
Reply

Short answer is everyone is on Facebook (or at least knows several people who use Facebook) and you can target individuals more specifically than you can with Google.

For example, if you are a company that sells anything to do with weddings be it flowers, dresses, cakes, invitations etc. and your business is located in Waterford, Ireland, you can target all the females within 50 miles of Waterford, who are engaged or in a relationship and get them to join your company facebook page.

If you are selling GAA merchandise you could target all the people from a certain towns and who have an interest in GAA.

In fact most businesses can get access to their target market very easily through a few simple clicks.  What’s more Facebook approximates how many people you will potentially advertise to based on your criteria selection. You can also target by gender, age and interests etc., you can even target by work place (if users have that set, unfortunately most users don’t set that field).

You can also get a bit more advanced with it and only advertise to friends of people who are currently subscribed to your page, or exclude people who are in certain groups or pages already.

The beauty of it is that once you have someone on your page you can repeat advertise to them for free :-) and what’s more their friends will see your messages via page updates on their profile. This is the beauty of Facebook advertising i.e. your money doesn’t stop working for you once the user clicks like on your ad.

Google ads has it’s own advantages, generally when people search online they search in surf mode, comparison mode and buy mode through the use of keywords and phrases.  You can get people coming to your site looking to purchase your goods if you get the key phrases right and not only will your ads appear on Google’s search results page it will also appear on other webmasters sites whose page topic matches the advert in terms of keywords and phrases.

The problem with Google is that you cannot focus in as specifically as with faceboook and you only get 1 shot at selling something based on the money you spend on a click.

So depending on your business Facebook could be an ideal way to capture your market and you can grow from there.

Should I use Multivariate testing?

Posted on by
Reply

Short answer is yes!

Google provides the facility to test the conversion rates of more than one version of a homepage, however I needed something more specific for a particular client.

Basically the site was getting a large amount of relevant traffic through organic search and google adwords but the coversion rate could be higher. The site has a predominantly red design and we had the apply button in the same colour which meant that it did not stand out as much as it should. However it was very prominent so we didn’t think it the colour would have much impact.

We were very wrong.

What we did was created a simple cookie system generating a random number for individual visits to the site.  The system generats a number between 1 and 6 and assigns it to a visitor.  The system then selects a variant of the button based on this number.  We chose 6 very different colours that contrasted with the overall red colour of the site and also left the existing button in place as 1 of the 6 random numbers.

After a few hours there were around 100 instances of each random number recorded and there were no conversions on the existing red button.  However, there were 10 conversions on a yellow version of the button.  This is a truly staggering increase and shows the value of trying out various options on a site in a controlled way.

I look forward to seeing a larger sample set over the coming weeks so that we can extrapolate further findings and further increase the conversion rate.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Posted on by
Reply

Often there is confusion between these two terms but the difference is stark and actually very simple.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is any means by which a website is promoted through search engines including paid ad programmes or Pay Per Click (PPC) programmes such as Google Adwords, Map Results such as Google Local Business Centre (now Google Places) or SEO techniques.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is about the techniques used to improve a page’s position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  Techniques used here consist of improving content on a page to better match what customers are searching for, and building up the popularity/importance of a site through link building.

Comments welcome.