Category Archives: Learn About How Internet Marketing Works

3 Simple Ways to Help your Blog be Found and Read

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digital marketing blogThe societal shift towards instant gratification in our media has completely altered the way we think about producing and digesting the written word, with online blogs in particular being a major force in the changing habits of both writers and readers.

When people say they want to read an epic blog post, they’re no longer talking about the length. As sad as it might sound to those with dreams of grandeur, unless you are a specially talented wordsmith or raconteur, the 2000 word wall of text you wrote for your digital marketing blog is unlikely to engage many people.

People want quick fixes of pleasure to get them through the gruelling fifteen minute bus commute to work, lists of easily digestible facts that go well with a coffee, and bite-sized nuggets of information they can devour with their fries on their lunch break.

If you’re regularly producing content for your digital marketing blog but finding the amount of either traffic or interaction is lower than you’d hoped, it might be time to rethink what you thought you knew about your desired audience.

Plan for the scan

The first thing to understand when producing content for your digital marketing blog is that even those who read it probably don’t really read it. When digesting web content, people scan, and the way your blog posts are formatted will be a bigger factor in people reading and interacting with them than even the content itself.

Because your digital marketing blog may live or die by the format, it has to be clear. We all know the importance of a good headline, but subheadings are just as vital in breaking up your topics into easier to swallow chunks, and even helping the reader to decide if they can skip to the next paragraph.

Using keywords in the subheadings is a very good idea too. Not only does it help with SEO, but it will also reinforce the relevance of the article to your reader’s interest if they have found it through an organic search.

To boldly go

To help the reader of your digital marketing blog pick out the information they are looking for, making bold the key points will cause them to jump out from the page.

Using this technique benefits yourself as much as it does your audience. While you may like to think they care about every line in your posts as much as you do, and want to spend time taking everything in, they probably don’t.

So while guiding them to the parts they want to see and showing them what to skip over by making bold the important points might sound counterintuitive for those wanting all of their content to be read, your reader is actually more likely to read more of your other digital marketing blog posts if you’re making it easier for them to find and digest the information.

Words and pictures

Whether images or video, using multimedia in your blog posts is vital to stimulating your reader into taking the action you want them to take.

As well as providing a break from the words, and being another effective way of breaking up the wall of text, images and video can get across messages in a way plain text never can.

The important thing to remember is to keyword your multimedia, usually by renaming the file before uploading, to give your digital marketing blog another chance to be found on Google.

People are increasingly going straight to Image searches to find what they are looking for, but your multimedia will not show in the results if it still has a generic, alphanumeric title.

Because most people scan articles on the internet rather than reading them, making your digital marketing blog easier to digest by breaking up the wall of text with key worded multimedia, subheadings, and with the important points made bold is vital in allowing your audience to find you, and in keeping them coming back.

 

For a look at our One Minute Tips and more on this topic, check out our Youtube page here:

Why Your Facebook Reach has Bombed and How to Fix It

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digital media marketingSince its inception around a decade ago, Facebook has grown and evolved into something far bigger and far different to anything the creators could ever have imagined.

Beginning life as a social network exclusively for Harvard students, the site has since expanded globally to become what is essentially the world’s largest database of potential customers for those wishing to advertise to them as part of their digital media marketing. In a manner of speaking, Facebook has left school and gone to work.

For enterprises of all sizes, from the multinational to the sole trader, having a Facebook business page has become almost a prerequisite. As one of the most successful companies of all time though, Facebook has of course recognized the power it possesses in controlling both the advertising platform and the audience.

Unfortunately for those with fan or business pages, Facebook has recently made changes to take advantage of this power, which has meant these pages’ organic reach have plummeted. If you’ve found this happening to your own page and affecting your digital media marketing, read on to find out why and how you can fix it.

Pay to play

Companies as successful as Facebook don’t often leave money on the table. If you’ve seen your Facebook digital media marketing efforts bringing increasingly worse returns, it will be due to the site changing their regulations and, more importantly, their algorithm.

From now on, business page posts will no longer show up in people’s news feeds in the way that personal updates do. The reason your engagement has bombed is because nobody is seeing your posts; and if nobody is seeing them, what is the point in even posting them?

There is however something you can do, and it goes back to Facebook not leaving money on the table.

Every time you post, you have the option of boosting it. Boosting a post is essentially paying to advertise it, either to people who already like your page or to the wider Facebook community as a whole. The typical cost works out to be around six dollars a day, but there really isn’t any way around it. Now, if you want to play, you have to pay.

What to boost

It’s no secret that visual posts tend to get more engagement than those featuring text and links only, so it follows that these are the best type of posts to spend your money on boosting.

Facebook however does set guidelines that all advertisers using the platform for their digital media marketing must follow, with the 20% rule in particular concerning the amount of space in an image that is taken up by text. By overlaying a 25-box grid over your image, Facebook can see how many of these boxes feature your text. Any more than 5 means you will have violated Facebook’s 20% policy, which will prevent your post from being boosted.

Ensuring your posts are more visual than promotional is vital if you want to remain in Facebook’s good books.

Who to boost to

Although Facebook has begun to charge money to allow you to reach its massive database of users, the good news is that the database itself is still there, and Facebook’s boost options allow you great flexibility in who you want to see your boosted posts. The ability to target posts and adverts with such precision is a dream come true for those involved with digital media marketing, which is why Facebook is so confident in its recent algorithm changes.

Depending on the nature of your posts, you can boost those about new products to people who already like your page, boost posts introducing your company to friends of those who like your page, and even tailor your boosts to certain geographical locations, age ranges, gender, and general interests.

The ease with which Facebook provided a world of potential customers for free to those in digital media marketing was never going to last forever, but by knowing why your engagement has been worsening and knowing how to set it right, you can steal a march on those who may still be unaware of the recent changes.

http://bit.ly/Facebook-Grid-Tool-1

Three Steps to Getting on Google

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If you want your website to be noticed, you have to get on Google.

Google-Ranking

And if you want to get on Google, you have to make yourself as visible as possible to them and their web crawlers.

Then of course once you’re on, you’re going to want make sure you stay there.

Getting and staying on Google can be broken down into three easily remembered stages:

·      Build (on-site SEO)

·      Engage (off site SEO)

·      Stay fresh (regular content)

Let’s elaborate and see what these points really entail.

Build – on-site SEO

Anyone who maintains their own website, be it for business or pleasure, should at least be aware that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a thing, even if they might not really understand it.

They also need to know that it comes in two flavours: on-site and off-site, and taking care of the on-site SEO while building your website is paramount if you want it to get on Google.

On-site SEO includes everything that your web design team can arrange for you, either behind the scenes or for public consumption; quality content with relevant keywords, page titles, Google text snippets, URLs, H1 or H2 headings, correctly tagged images, outbound links, and having a site map.

All of these will affect your Google rank, although some (content and titles) carry more weight than others (alt tags on images).

Engage – off-site SEO

As the name suggests, off-site SEO covers everything you can do in other places online to improve your own SEO and help you to get on Google.

One metric used by Google to measure your ranking is the quality of your inbound links; that is, links from other places directing people to your site.

The practice of link building has long been a big part of any SEO campaign, although the focus has now shifted to the subtly different but more interpersonal practice of link earning.

Advisable ways of earning the high quality links that help you to get on Google include reaching out to bloggers and asking them to link to your best content, or offer to write a guest post with a link back to your site.

Leaving useful, non-generic comments on relevant blog posts with a link back to your site also works, as does being active and respected on a forum that allows you to display your web address in your signature or in posts.

Building a community on social media is another great way to improve the engagement with your content, if you can encourage your audience to share it directly from your site.

Stay fresh – regular content

While on and off-site SEO practices help you to get on Google, the ubiquitous search engine also takes into account the freshness of your website and its content.

It makes sense; after all, Google wants you to keep using its service, so strives to give the most relevant, freshest results it can. Stale websites get punished by falling in the rankings.

Even if most of your website’s pages are static and don’t change, there are ways to maintain a steady stream of new content. The most common is a regular blog, with the opportunity for people to comment on the posts.

Depending on the nature of your site, running a forum is also a possibility and helps with the fresh posts and interaction that Google values so highly.

Get on Google, Stay on Google

Being found through organic search engine results is vital to your business, and that means one thing: you have to get on Google.

By following the three key stages of building, engaging and staying fresh, you’ll give yourself the best of chance of both getting and staying there.

Web Assessments

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Today’s websites are the greatest marketing tool there is.  They are the best tools for communicating with customers and showcasing your products and services.  They are the lifeblood of your brand and convey your status, reputation, and position in the market.  That’s why web assessments are so critical to learning whether you are making the most of your website.

These are a few questions that our web assessments answer:  (1) Can consumers find your website easily when they search the internet for companies that sell the products and services you do?  (2) Does your company’s name surface often on the internet?  (3) Is your website designed to invite customers to your site’s inside pages to check out your products and make a purchase?  (4) Can people locate your website through social media? Do your social media sites direct traffic to your website?

Web assessment points 1 and 2 (above): Can consumers find your website easily?

Web assessments tells you whether search engines like Google and Yahoo can “read” your website, so that your company name and products come up often when people search for them on the internet.  Through search-engine optimization (SEO), your website and products are located more often, and your name can even seem to pop up everywhere when someone searches for your brand.

SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are used by your targeted consumers.  The more often a website appears in search-engine results, the more often people will visit it.

By the way, can consumers access your website using their mobile phone?  That’s another matter to consider when you ask for web assessments.

Website assessment point 3: Is your website designed to invite customers?

Every site is designed, but few are designed well.  When it comes to website design, you don’t want it to look a mess.  You want your brand, logo, colours, and company’s personality to explode from the home page and pull consumers inside.  On the inner pages of the site, they read fascinating, well-written snippets on what’s great about you and your products and services.  They see exciting themes– photographs, drawings, or picture-caption copy that communicates as well as the writing.

Bear in mind that a website built from a cookie-cutter template lacks original design and can seem amateurish for companies in the business of attracting customers or even employees.  If you want to look professional—hire a professional designer to make you look good.  Your reputation is at stake.

Consider the amazing sites that will impress visitors

All websites can be scaled to include digital catalogs, e-commerce, forums, message boards, blogs, auctions, contests, sales coupons that flash like light bulbs, newsletters, chat, classifieds, photo galleries, games, reviews, donation buttons, event enrollment forms, comments sections, and response forms. The only limitations are your imagination.  By the way, we design catchy and meaningful logos.

Website assessment point 4:  Do your social media sites direct traffic to your website?

Are you on social media?  Your competitors are.  Do you “share” your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and so on.  Since you want to be on every corner of the web, it’s essential to incorporate social media into your website.  This means having great social media links.  You want all your sites—social media and web—to communicate with one another.

Web assessments are a must.  If you do any digital work at all, ensure it’s focused on improving your website’s design, SEO, and connection to social media.

Crafting a Practical SEO Strategy

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Every business owner should know something about search engine optimization (SEO), even if it’s just the name.

internet marketing how to

But not everybody knows where to start when it comes to crafting a practical and effective SEO strategy.

Any SEO strategy hoping to succeed begins way before the website design has even started and never really ends.

Here are 3 practical steps to crafting an SEO strategy:

SEO Strategy Step 1: Know your objectives, know your audience

Before you begin planning your SEO strategy, you need to really define what you’re trying to achieve with your website.

What is the real objective of your site? What do you want your website visitors to do once you have them there?

Once you know this, you need to identify who your audience is going to be in order to know how to entice them. What do they do? What do they like? What don’t they like? How old are they? Where are they located? Where do they hang out online?

With this information gathered, you can combine it with your primary objective to come up with a secondary one: getting these people to visit your site.

SEO Strategy Step 2: On and off-site SEO

The single most important part of your on-site SEO is going to be the quality of your content, and you will live or die by the keywords used in that.

They are going to have to be relevant to how your target audience will find you, relevant to your site itself, and with a high enough search volume to make it worthwhile to use the keywords.

Much of the rest of your on-site SEO strategy is going to follow the same formula that everyone does: making sure every title, page, image, URL, text snippet, and anything else is optimized for your target audience to find you.

Where you will need to get a little creative is with the off-site SEO strategy.

This is all about getting the word out and earning the links back.

Contacting and building relationships with peers, commenting on relevant blog posts and forums, offering guest blogs on authority sites in return for links back to your own, and having a high quality social media presence are all ways to improve your off-site SEO.

The fun part is identifying what is likely to work and what isn’t. Which authority sites are receptive to guest bloggers? Which have the more open-minded audience, willing to give somewhere new a minute or two of their time?

Is the older, recipe and interior decoration Pinterest crowd better for your niche or the younger coffee shop hipsters on Instagram?

SEO Strategy Step 3: Monitoring and tracking your engagement

So having made sure all of the above has been carried out to the absolute best it could have been, you’ve now got traffic coming out of your ears.

Or maybe just a steady trickle.

Either way, you need to know where your traffic is coming from and what it’s doing on your site. Using Google Analytics lets you monitor all of this information, providing great insight into where you can still improve. And you can always improve.

Monitoring how changes affect your site, utilizing split testing techniques, and keeping an eye on what the more successful of your competitors are doing right is all part of an ongoing SEO strategy too.

From before the beginning to the end that never comes

A great SEO strategy treats a website like a mother does a baby.

Really.

The planning begins well before the birth, and the care and attention never ends.

The 6 Step Social Media Plan For Business

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Today let’s talk about how to create a successful social media strategy!

The very first thing you want to do before you do anything else is figure out what your objective for your social media plan is.


Are you trying to grow a large community on your social platforms?

Are you trying to generate qualified leads?

Are you trying to get traffic back to your website?

Its only when you know what your objective is that you can then start to put a successful social media plan together.

 

Step 2- evaluate your social media resources.

Is it just you that is going to be engaging on social media for your business or do you have a team of people at your office or perhaps consultants that you have hired to help you with this?

Once you have figured out how much time and energy you have to utilize in social media, then you can go ahead and move on to the next step which is the execution.

Step 3- identify your target on social media & what they care about

So a big part of social media is content. You have to determine what content is important to your target audience and how you are going to get that content out there.

Step 4- curate & create content for your social media platforms

A big way to save time is to curate content which is to share content that has already been posted from other resources onto your own platforms.

The other option is to create your own content, like blog posts, videos like the one below and even images.

Step 5- create a social media schedule.

Then you want to commit to a schedule. Make sure you are posting consistently, whether that is once a day, once a week or once a month.

Consistency is key to building trust with your audience on social media.

Step 6- measure the results of your social media efforts.

Lastly, make sure you are measuring your efforts every single month or at least once a quarter.

Take a look at what is working and what is not working as it relates to your objective.

There, you can find out what posts are getting more engagement, more comments and which ones are driving more traffic back to your site and then you can tweak your strategy from there in terms of what you are posting and when!

CNN Interview: Social Proof & How it Affects Consumer Buying Decisions

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Let’s talk about how to leverage social proof to influence your customer’s buying decisions.

What is the psychology of decision making?  How does that fit into the new world of communication and how people research decisions?

Check out Laurel’s interview on CNN where she answers these questions and more:

A transcript of the interview is below:

There has been a powerful shift in consumer behaviour in the last 10 or so years.

Previously consumers didn’t have that much power when they were making a buying decision, they would have to go into a showroom and talk to a salesperson to get information.

With the advent and extremely huge adoption of web usage, consumers now have most of the power and are doing most of the pre-buying research before they even contact the business in question.

So, one of the things customers are looking for as they go through the buying process is social proof.

Social proof essentially provides trust that the business has done good work before and can be trusted to do so again.

The way that that is conveyed typically is social proof: testimonials, recommendations, credibility of having up to date website, presence on social media etc. More importantly that other people have interacted with the business and had a positive result.

In this transparent internet world, customers have the ability to submit reviews and testimonials and reviews basically anywhere on the web.

Consumers can review your business on google, Yelp, Facebook.  What this does is affect your search rankings as a business owner on the internet.

The more positive reviews you have for example, on google the higher your business will rank over and above those that don’t have as many positive reviews.

It is one of the top ways people are able to vet your business and see if they will have a good experience. Its certainly recommended to get as many positive reviews as possible.

Also acknowledge any negative reviews you get. Let’s face it, you cant please everyone but by ignoring negative reviews it actually does more damage than simply addressing those concerns people have. it is tremendously affective in convincing your customers you do provide great service.

Q. How do product and service endorsements fit into the modern world?

Product and service endorsements are one of the most powerful ways to sell a new client or customer.

You can tell them all you want how great you are but having words come from someone you have done business with already, using their experience, will most precisely mirror the experience of your future customer.

To have older clients and customers positively reviewing you and going through the experience that they had will tick all the boxes in terms of addressing the concerns your future customers will have.

Q. There is an idea of a difference between implied and explicit endorsements. What is the difference between the two?

Implicit endorsement is something that is occurring a lot through social media.

For example, If you have a Facebook business page and you have 7 people like your photo, they are implicitly endorsing you as someone they do and would do business with and that they know, like and trust.

That is the power of social media and why it works so well. It could also be how many fans you have and followers on your youtube channel. It builds credibility.

Explicit endorsement are things like reviews and testimonials from past clients as well as any reviews you may have or items that would position you as a thought leader.

Any PR or being featured in magazines, interviews on TV stations like CBC, CNN etc, that is also very credible social proof that gets a bigger spread and impact.

If you found this post valuable, please share! And don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel

Pro Tips to Using Pinterest for Business

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Today in your one minute tip we are going to be talking about how you can use Pinterest to promote your small business.

Pinterest is a social media marketing tool that is free to use and really easy because its basically about collecting images and pinning them.


So why can this work for small business?

First, pins on Pinterest last a really long time on the newsfeed.

so if you pinned something 3 months ago that has the ability to stay in the news feed and get promoted, seen or shared for up to 3 months from the time you posted it.

That is a long time compared to other social media sites. For each pin that you are pinning, you get a lot of longevity out of that.

Secondly, it is really easy to build community on Pinterest.

All you need to do is go and re-pin others content, share it to your own boards and like it and comment on it. Its that easy!

There is lots of fantastic stuff that people are talking about on Pinterest. They’re talking about holidays, food, all kinds of stuff.

You don’t need to necessarily pin anything business related, just go and network with the people that you already know. You can go and sync your existing contacts into Pinterest and just begin with your community and go from there.

Third, you can use Pinterest to drive more traffic to your website.

If you re-pin images from your website, IE your blog, onto Pinterest that allows you to drive traffic back to your website and position yourself as an expert in your field.

So its a triple whammy, using Pinterest to start driving business to your site.

That’s your one minute tip and if you found this valuable, please remember to share!

If you like this video- subscribe to my channel & never miss a tip!

 

 

What to do when you can’t remove bad reviews online

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A bad review can have a devastating impact on your business reputation.

So, how can you protect yourself and your business from bad reviews?

What if you can’t remove bad reviews?

First of all, take heart.

Bad reviews happen to everyone and every business no matter how hard you try to please everyone.

In many cases, you know exactly who the customer is, and the situation they’re dealing with.

Sometimes this customer may be unreasonable, highly emotional, unaccountable for their part in the situation- or worse- all three.

Here are 7 ways to deal with a bad review. 

  1. DO NOT ignore the review. You must take proactive steps to address the bad review.
  2. Avoid the temptation to argue or blame your customer.
  3. In the same forum for review- publicly acknowledge how they’re feeling and that they’re obviously upset.
  4. Invite them to contact you directly so you can make it right.
  5. Reiterate online exactly what you did or are willing to do to make it right.
  6. Contact them directly and ask them to remove the bad review.
  7. Solicit positive reviews until you have more good than bad.

By addressing the review that just wont go away you’re being accountable, transparent and honest. All traits that anyone reading reviews of your business will appreciate.

 

 

 

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Yourself on Social Media

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In this live on Google Hangout’s interview we cover what every business owner needs to know about social media.

The interview is a follow up to Laurel’s book- Social on 17 – How to successfully market yourself on social media in only 17 minutes a day.

In this 49 minute interview, we cover; Social Media Do’s and Don’ts, How often to Post, Using Automated Tools, The HIT List, How to Blog for your Business.Screen Shot 2014-06-03 at 3.11.00 PM

BONUS: How to ask for the sale and How to Differentiate yourself from the competition.

Hit play and go on with your workday, and in less than an hour you will have learned everything you need to know about marketing yourself on social media!

If you like this post, please share!