Digital Sandip

Your First Email Marketing Campaign

Congratulations! So you've started your business and now you are thinking of landing your first contact. You heard money is in the list and you are now thinking of creating a list of prospective clients for future marketing purposes. Or perhaps you haven't created your first contact but you intend to start a list.

The thought sounds exciting and adventurous until you discover that you can lose those hard earned contacts and worse, you could be criminally charged for spamming or sending unsolicited emails on the internet. Most of us are unaware that there are laws that prohibit businesses sending unsolicited emails on the internet and we become liable when we do the wrong thing.

In this article, I will show you how to create an email campaign without putting you or your business at risk. You will develop what is called a "whitelist" which means a list of authorized contacts while maximizing your earning potential through lead generation. You will also learn what is email marketing, how to build your first authorized email list, how to create autoresponders, and how to use email marketing as the premier tool for success in your business. Let's start with sending a clear message...

Sending Loud and Clear

Let us say that you have never sent an email before and you are thinking of introducing your products and services to potential buyers. The first impression is always the best foot inside the door of any business. Therefore you want to ensure that an introductory letter is prepared. This should be brief and highlight the features and benefits of your business to the prospect.

Once your letter is prepared, make sure it is edited properly before sending it to your contacts. Depending on the nature of your business, you should target people who would be interested in your offer. In order to determine this, you could look at the yellow pages within your neighborhood or community,

After you have identified your market you are now ready to make your first communication with them. This communication is referred to as an email marketing campaign, but first, we need to seek permission from these contacts. Many would ask the question: "what is email marketing"? We will now look at how an Email Marketing Campaign aids in this communication...

Email Marketing Campaign

This form of communication is one of the best ways to communicate effectively with your contacts. It is a planned and organized way of sending emails, newsletters, updates or marketing information to your customers and prospects in a timely manner.

Time-based emails are normally automated and sensitive. Sending an email at the wrong time could negatively impact the desired response. On the other hand, sending emails regularly and on a timely basis could improve the possibility of future business between parties.

With that being said, there are 4 important things to look for in an effective email marketing campaign.

Who is sending the email- It is legally mandated that contact information is affixed to your email campaign. This adds credibility to your message and creates trust about your business.

Content- This form of communication is different from ordinary emails because it is specific to your business. Whether you are sending a newsletter, or you are informing your contacts about an offer or promotion, it must be clear in your mail.

Action- Your email must have an action at the end for it to be effective. These actions are normally linked to a sales page, an offer or a giveaway. If one is sending a newsletter, it must be very informative and entertaining. It should highlight community happenings, events or notices.

Opt In Features- Unfortunately, there could be a time when your contact is no longer interested in your offers or business. He or she should have an option to exit your program. It is mandated by law to have your unsubscribe button at the end of your email marketing campaigns.

Authorized Recipients

Now that you have ascertained who to send these emails to, you are ready to dispatch them. Your list should have contact persons who agreed to receive your first emails. Once the client agrees, you should create a template email that indicates you recently received permission to send emails. After the prospective customer receives and clicks the "subscribe" link in the email, they are automatically added to your list.

You can build various lists within your email marketing account. This enables you to send relevant offers and information to each list, for example, "work from home list" "employed list" "students list" "Customers list" "Prospect list" and so on.

If you did not get permission, in the beginning, you should not send an email marketing campaign until you at least first communicate with your prospective contact.

The purpose of this preliminary exercise is to reduce the likelihood of unsubscribed contacts on your list. Although you cannot control when someone decides to unsubscribe from your program, there is an accepted ratio that will not send a red flag to your email marketing providers.

If there are too many unsubscribes and spam report, your account could be terminated or BLOCKED. Therefore, it is reiterated and advisable that you get permission prior to sending your first email marketing campaign.

When you have satisfied the above requirement and are ready to send your emails, you will be asked some questions by the provider. This is a further attempt to advise you of the laws of email marketing and also to ensure policies are adhered to with respect to a method you used in garnering your first contact list. In addition, it is an opportunity to welcome you to the email marketing program.

Now that you have satisfied the above criteria, you are ready to send your first email marketing campaign. However, after sending your first campaign, there is no need to manually time and follow through. Setting up an email marketing campaign allows you to set the time and frequency of trigger emails. These trigger emails are called autoresponders.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are time-sensitive emails that are sent out automatically to your contact list. The purpose of this smart way of communicating is to keep your list updated and fresh. It also provides life to your business as it triggers a follow up once someone receives, opens or reads your emails. You can always change how you want your autoresponders to be sent.

Your email marketing plan should allow you to create signup forms which could be embedded on your website. The smart way to build contacts is to affix your email marketing link in your personal email. Please be reminded that it MUST have an opt-in link to allow the subscriber to enter or leave your program at any time. THIS IS MANDATORY.

The key to a successful email campaign is to keep your emails unique, short and very informative. Always remember to communicate your intentions with a link to solicit further actions. Once you set a time for the email to be sent, you will be able to get feedback. Let's use similar initiative to review the entire purpose of email marketing.

Feedback

We have looked at how to create an email marketing campaign by preparing for the first authorized recipients of the campaign. We further looked at creating an effective autoresponder and now we will need a feedback from our program to tweak our marketing efforts.

Fortunately, most email marketing software have tracking capabilities similar to Google analytics. This tells you the demography, affinity, and habits of your target markets. The software also indicates who opens your email, unsubscribe or take action by clicking on a link and so on. Having reviewed all the relevant details of the work that you put into your email marketing campaign, you will be able to change your timing, improve your product information, or increase your list to improve your chances of conversion in the future.

Your company's Email Marketing campaign should set the pace for your business expansion while you concentrate on another aspect of your business. The good thing about email marketing is that when the entity is not open for business, email marketing is still open 24/7. That is the beauty about online marketing and technology.

Jon Oringer once quoted: "The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive."

Affiliate Marketing is one of best ways to start with to begin making money online. When promoting an Affiliate Offer, you simply recommend a product that provides value to others. This doesn't require a lot of effort to set everything up. You can do it by directly promoting the Affiliate offer or send the traffic via social marketing or paid marketing to your Squeeze Page first to build up your list. You can set up the whole funnel in less than an hour to get ready to start sending visitors to your offer.

I've seen many Affiliate Marketers (especially newbies) fail because promoting Affiliate Marketing products require some steps to be taken. If you skip one or more steps, the odds of people buying your recommended Affiliate Products becomes lower.

This is why in this article I will highlight the 4 main steps needed to make you a successful Affiliate Marketer. Each of these steps is essential and all successful Affiliate Marketers take each of those steps into account.

Choose Your Niche

This is the first and most important step to take into account. I can easily say that if this step isn't done correctly, everything else almost won't matter. You need to choose a niche that is proven to be profitable and with high demand. This will definitely increase the odds of other people buying your products or Affiliate Products that you recommend.

Not all niches are the same in term of demand and profitability. This is a very common mistake most marketers do. They think that they can just go ahead with any niche and start promoting right away.

Most proven profitable niches are Health, Wealth and Relationship. However, there are many other niches that are profitable and with high demand. There are five main factors to consider when choosing your niche:

Passion: It is far better to choose a niche that you're passionate about. This is help you on continuing to take actions after each failure. Loving what you do is a great weapon to have to make your business successful. However this by itself isn't enough because you need to choose a niche that's profitable as well.

Evergreen: When you choose a niche ask yourself "Is it evergreen?" If you don't know what an evergreen is, it means niche that is always demanded and never gets old. Wealth, health and relationship are great examples of evergreen niches. That's because at all time people look for ways to make money, become healthy and find relationship or maintain it. Whatever niche you choose, it's far better that it's evergreen to keep profiting from your products not only for a certain amount of time.

High Demand: This is the most important factor to consider for product creation. The niche should be on demand by others in order to make sales. No matter how great your product is, if not highly demand, it will barely make few sales but not a sustainable business that you may maintain and scale up.

Specific: Choosing a broad niche isn't going to bring you targeted traffic. This is because you didn't make it clear which segment your chosen niche is. For example if you make a product and only indicated that it's about wealth, this is a wide topic to talk about. Because wealth could be Internet Marketing, Forex, Real Estate, Physical Business and the list goes on. By only indicating that it's about wealth, you'll get traffic from all these segments and most won't need what you provide. However, if you specified it's about Affiliate Marketing, then more targeted people will see your offer and you'll more likely make sales and get sustainable income online.

Digital Product: When choosing a niche ask yourself "Can I make a Digital Product out of it?". Some niche or products are highly demanded but can't make Digital Products out of it. For example T-Shirts are highly demanded, people buy T-shirts every day. However, if you make a Digital Product about it will it be as much demanded? Who wants to watch or read about T-Shirts? People like to wear them. But Affiliate Marketing is a product that can be is high demanded if done as Digital Product.

Build Your Platform

This step is a great way of marketing yourself and becoming an authority via Social. Using this step, other people see your work and know that you know what you're talking about, not just someone who's only willing to promote products to make sales.

There are four great platforms to use:

WordPress: Every successful Internet Marketer nowadays have a domain with WordPress installed on it. WordPress is an easy to use website creation tool and mostly the easiest way of creating websites nowadays. It just requires some steps to make your website ready to be live. You can create many type of webpages using WordPress, one of the most common one is a blog. Internet Marketers create a blog to create content that provide value to others and may also promote products.

Facebook: Who doesn't know Facebook? This website is ranked second with and has more than one billion active users. You can take advantage of this huge platform by creating a page creating content that gets you tons of visitors who may turn to your ongoing customers. Your content will be ranked high because of the power of Facebook online. People like searching for Facebook Pages related to their needs and this creates a huge opportunity that you may take advantage of.

YouTube: YouTube is the most popular video website on the planet, with visitors watching around 6 billion hours of videos monthly. The great things about videos is that they create more engagement than text or audio. People enjoy watching videos and they learn more on video tutorials than reading reports or blog posts. This is a huge opportunity for you to keep creating valuable videos on regular basis. This helps you to rank your videos higher and thus get more visitors to watch your videos.

Tumblr: This is another Social Media platform that you can use to create blog posts. Tumblr is a popular platform to use and maybe even your main platform of creating your content and branding yourself.

Grow Your Audience

This step is for getting traffic to your website to build your business. As you know, traffic is the bloodline of any business online and without it there is no business.

There are many sources of traffic but I'll outline five powerful traffic sources:

Social Media: This is a great way to get traffic online. Almost everyone uses at least one Social Media platform which is a great opportunity to work on. But this of course requires some work by creating content on regular basis on matters that other people need to know about.

Solo Ads: Solo Ads clicks traffic comes from people who open the email that is sent by the Solo Ads Provider. This means that the Solo Ads provider sends an Email to part of his list (depending on the number of clicks) with a link of the website you provide to him.

PPC: Stands for Pay Per Click is an internet advertising model which directs traffic to a specific website. You create an advertisement (text and/or image) that when visitors click it redirects them directly to your website. If used correctly, you get highly targeted traffic for your business which increases your sales and income consistency.

Blog: As we said above, blogs are very powerful in term of branding yourself and becoming an authority. You get free highly targeted traffic and you get them to trust you and buy products from you because they've seen that you can provide them value with each product you provide.

YouTube: Video Marketing is a very powerful weapon to use nowadays and so you may take advantage of it. You can create some informative tips, product reviews, ongoing tutorials and much more using the power of YouTube. You get free highly targeted traffic and people will enjoy watching your videos and learn from you.

Promote Products

This is the final step which makes the monetization. You make all previous steps not for fun but to make money online. This step provides you a great way of getting sales online either by selling your own product or promoting other people's products.

There are five great websites that provide great products to promote:

ClickBank.com: This is one of the most popular affiliate websites online. It has a product of almost all niches online which helps you to choose the niche you want to make your business on and choose products that are proven to sell.

Clicksure.com: Similar to ClickBank.com and very powerful as well.

Warriorplus.com: This is another great affiliate website to consider, but only if you're in money making niche. All products there money making techniques so if you're in a different niche you can just skip this website.

JVZoo.com: Similar to warriorplus.com but with products of higher prices generally.

Mucheye.com: This website is very useful because it shows products that didn't launch yet. This allows you to be more prepared to promote the product you choose and will have less competition because most people promote launched products. It shows products of warriorplus, JVzoo and some other affiliate websites.

Now you know the four main steps you need to know to become a successful affiliate marketer online. This guide will help you to know how to choose your niche, build your platform, grow your audience and promote products.

Pay-per-click advertising has become one of the most effective tools available in online marketing.

When compared to social media, search engine optimization, content marketing and so on, it stands alone in its potential to see an almost immediate boost in traffic and conversions. Keep in mind, however, that it’s a multifaceted discipline that’s easy to get wrong. If you want to see a more successful PPC campaign, you have to be ready to innovate your approach.

Here are fifteen changes you can start making right now to see results.

#1 – Choose Your Keywords Well

PPC ads work by having you bid on matching specific keywords to your ad. How effective your bid depends on, among other factors, how much you spend, so you want to make sure that you’re bidding on the right keywords.

For Google AdWords, for instance, the Keyword Planner is a great tool that gives you keyword suggestions, letting you research and pick amongst the most effective. While this is a good place to start, bear in mind that many of your competitors might get the same keywords from Google.

If you find any words or phrases that the Keyword Planner doesn’t suggest, then you might have stumbled onto a keyword that your competitors aren’t already bidding on.
Learn More: The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research

#2 – Lead with Value First

It’s a solid tactic across all marketing niches and it works for PPC, too.

While your keywords should focus in part on the details and descriptions of what you offer, let the actual ad copy take a value-based approach.

For instance, rather than writing copy that describes your services as a “social media marketing company,” describe the values and benefits of the service, such as “increase your traffic,” “grow your conversions,” and “improve your impressions.”

Don’t think about what the customer literally gets, but rather what value your products and services offer them. How are you going to solve their problem and make their life better?

Free Bonus Download: Get a list of 13 quick tricks to increase your conversion rates right now – actionable advice condensed into a PDF that will increase your conversion rates today! Click here to download it for free right now! #3 – Include a Call to Action
It’s always best to end an ad with a call to action. The main body of the copy should offer the value and make it about the customer. In other words, show why people should use your service. What are they going to get?

Your CTA should clearly give the potential convert an actionable next step that the rest of the copy has been gearing them up for. A good call to action also adds a sense of urgency to the ad, like there’s something there for them to capitalize on there right now.

An effective CTA should:

Be compelling
Have a clear benefit for the user
Continue the conversion momentum
Actually, cause action
Simple calls to action like “sign up” or “download now” or “start my free trial” have proven to be a lot more effective than ads that don’t have CTAs.

Netflix has an especially compelling call to action: “Join free for a month.” The text just above the button also ads to it: “Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.”

#3 – Target both Newcomers and Old-Hands

If you’re familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel, then you’re aware that you can convert people who are at different stages in the funnel.

The first stage is building awareness and interest, and this is where most PPC campaigns aim for. They use keywords to target those who might not know exactly what your business provides.

However, people in the latter stages of the marketing funnel know exactly what companies like yours provide and already have a purchasing intent. Use keywords specifically for people in the commitment stage of the marketing funnel, such as “hire social media management team.”

The closer your ad viewer is to having that purchasing intent, the more likely they are to convert.

#4 – Should You Bid on Brands?

Some people will say that you should never bid on branded keywords. There is some wisdom in this. For instance, you shouldn’t bid on your own brand.

If someone knows your brand name, they can visit your site directly; they don’t need you to pay for an ad to lead them there. However, if you provide products that belong to other brands, then you should bid on those keywords.

So if you’re a Peugeot car dealer, don’t bid on your own business brand; instead, bid on “Peugeot cars for sale.” It helps match you up with people who are looking for specific products but who have a variety of suppliers to buy from.

#5 – Find Your Long-tail Keywords

Many businesses and individuals stick to short-tail keywords; that is, keywords that are only 1-3 words long, such as “buy Peugeot cars.” This is the easiest way to make sure that you’re bidding to as broad an audience as possible, and likely getting more clicks.

However, a long-tail keyword like “buy used Peugeot cars London” is more specific, but it’s also going to appear more prevalently to those specific people who are more likely to convert. So you’ll want to find the long-tail keywords that apply best to your business.

A good way to do that is to look at the organic search results that have led to your web pages in the past.

#6 – Quality over Quantity

Many PPC platforms have their own standards for what can help you win a bid. It’s not just about how much you’re willing to spend, but the quality of your ads, as well. In AdWords, for instance, this is measured by a “Quality Score”.

This takes into account not just your click-through rate, but the relevance of the ads to the chosen keywords and the relevance of the site to the ads. Improve your Quality Score, first and foremost, by making sure that you’re eliminating any keywords for ad groups where they’re not relevant.

#7 – Focus Your Ad Groups

Relevance is a big part of what makes an ad group likely to have a better Quality Score. For that reason, you should make each of your ad groups fit a specific purpose.

For instance, if your business provides both social media marketing and search engine optimization services, you could brand them both together in ads for general digital marketing.

However, you’re likely to get more clicks and conversions if you create a separate ad group for the social media marketing keywords and for the search engine optimization keywords.

Ad groups work best when they have a narrow target. The broader the range of keywords, the more diverse the copy, and thus the harder it is for an ad group to work effectively.

Learn More: How to Take Your AdWords Campaign to the Next Level

#8 – Cut Clicks that Don’t Convert

You might find that a lot of people are getting exposed to your PPC advertisement, despite not being the kind of web user that you want to market to.

For instance, back to the car dealer example: if you sell only Peugeot cars, you don’t want your ads to appear to people who are searching for Mazda car dealers. You can use negative keyword modifiers to make sure that your ad doesn’t appear for irrelevant searches. In this case, you would assign “Mazda” as one of your negative keywords.

There are broader categories of keywords you might want to disallow, too. For example, unless you’re offering a free trial, make “free” a negative keyword. Many people might be searching for a company like yours as a place of employment, so if you’re not hiring, make “employment,” “job,” “hiring,” and “career” negative keywords.

You should continue to build your negative keyword list over time. This will prevent you from spending money on clicks that don’t lead to conversions.

Free Bonus Download: Get a list of 13 quick tricks to increase your conversion rates right now – actionable advice condensed into a PDF that will increase your conversion rates today! Click here to download it for free right now! #10 – Be Selective about Who Sees Your Ads
Keep in mind that there are people who will click on your ad with no intent to use your services.

There have been a lot of cases of “click fraud” where, for instance, businesses have clicked on their competitor’s PPC ads several times just to make them spend money without getting anything in return.

This could make your PPC campaign much more expensive, so use IP Exclusion to identify those IPs that are clicking your ads without converting. It makes sure that the ad doesn’t appear to those people in future.

We delve into what these two practices are, how they differ from each other, and their importance to your organization.

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If you run a new small business, then you’re probably still building out your marketing strategy. During your planning and research, you likely came across the term "marketing automation." Think of marketing automation as the smarter and more powerful older sibling of email marketing. Both practices let you reach large audiences with scheduled and automated email messages. Both use information pulled from customer relationship management (CRM) software to send relevant and personalized messages to segmented customer lists. The similarities are plentiful.

“Email marketing is a piece of marketing automation,” explained Jon Dick, VP of Marketing at HubSpot. “Think of a cake. If marketing is a cake, then email marketing is like the flour inside of the cake. Email marketing is one of the ingredients. You could do marketing automation without email marketing but the cake wouldn’t taste as good.”

In other words, email marketing is an excellent tool for giving marketers reach, which is the ability to get promotions in front of as many customers as possible. Marketing automation is about adding relevance to that reach.

“Every marketer wants to have relevance with their audience," said Dick. "Relevance requires marketers to do two things: provide context and act with speed. That’s what marketing automation helps you do.”

6 Scary Email Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

What email marketer isn’t stricken with anxiety when it’s time to hit send on a new campaign? We all make mistakes, but a lot of those mistakes are avoidable with the right care and preparation. Here are six of the most common and preventable email marketing mistakes and how you can take steps to avoid them.

The mistake: A missing data source

Your email marketing content is only as strong as the data that powers it. There’s nothing worse than plotting out your most personalized campaign ever, only to have it break because some of your data fields aren’t populating correctly. With more and more marketers taking advantage of customer data in their emails, it’s even more important to make sure that data is sound.

How to avoid it: Always have fallback content ready, just in case there is a data field missing. Also be sure to double-check your fields – the last thing you need is an expletive in place of a customer’s name sneaking through! Want more tips for reviewing your personalized emails? Use our Email Marketing Personalization Checklist before you deploy your next campaign.

The mistake: Broken images or animation

Broken images are the bane of any email marketer’s existence, but this is still a common problem across the board. And while you can’t control which email clients your customers use, it helps to have a good understanding of who is using what.

How to avoid it: Many email clients block images by default, but there are still steps you can take ensure you’re creating a great experience for your customers. Taking advantage of alt-text will help you give your customers a heads-up as to what should be appearing in their image blocks when nothing is appearing at all. It’s also important to test your email creative across email clients, so use a took like Litmus to preview your campaign before you deploy it.

The mistake: Generic, irrelevant content

Sending the exact same message to all of your customers is an incredibly common mistake and creates a big missed opportunity. According to Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that uses personalization and makes recommendations based on past purchase behavior. Relevancy, context, and true 1:1 personalization are all key for building trust with your customers.

The mistake: Spelling and grammar issues

It’s happened to the best of us: we hit send, only to realize four seconds later that we made a glaringly obvious spelling mistake on an otherwise awesome email. And guess what our customers notice immediately? Not your amazing, personalized offer and the beautiful imagery that goes along with it, but the fact that you used the wrong “their.”

How to avoid it: It should go without saying that every email you send needs a second pair of eyes – Every. Single Time. Always identify a colleague who can give your email a read and provide honest feedback. If you want an extra layer of protection, try a tool like Grammarly that will automatically catch both spelling and grammatical errors for you.

The mistake: Broken or dead-end links

If your call-to-action is broken, it’s impossible to reach your email marketing goals and track your click-through rates. And speaking of tracking, if you don’t have your UTM parameters in place, you also won’t be able to track any leads generated via email.

How to avoid it:

Add extra time to your email marketing production schedule so you can QA every part of your email and ensure that all of your links are fully functional. Always review your deadlines too – you should never hit send unless you’re 100% confident that everything is working properly. Rushing to get a campaign out the door is never a good idea!

Search engines are powerful tools for bringing people to your business. The challenge that many entrepreneurs face, however, is that they’re not well-versed in how to communicate with the robots that control the algorithm behind Google and Bing.

Your business might be the absolute best at what it does. But you need to follow a set of concrete steps to share your story and reach your target audiences as a result. Fellow entrepreneurs and search engine experts share their best tips:

Know the difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine Optimization (SEO)
Jeffrey Bumbales, marketing associate at small business loans company Credibly, explains that it’s important for entrepreneurs to understand the subtle differences between the two. Here’s how he describes the difference:

SEO is the practice of testing and improving digital content to organically make your website more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs)
SEM includes the umbrella of paid marketing campaigns — marketers within companies can bid to rank for keywords that their target audiences are searching for. Marketers pay for these advertising placements on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis
This subtle distinction will help marketers and business owners best identify where to focus and dedicate their time.

“The biggest pitfall that small business owners experience is a misunderstanding of what SEO and SEM is,” says Bumbales. “This results in an inability to identify where the right customers are and how to best relate to them.”

If your business is competing with bigger companies — and bigger marketing budgets — SEM may be out of your company’s reach. Or, at the very least, you’ll need to prioritize how you allocate investments towards paid and organic campaigns.

Regardless of where you invest your marketing time — with SEO or SEM — here are the steps that you’ll need to take to get seen by search engines.

Focus on local SEO

Small businesses in Europe, especially, should focus on local SEO. Gregory Golinski, SEO executive for YourParkingSpace.co.uk shares the following tips for capturing local audiences across Europe:

Set up your Google My Business profile, and register your company on local, high-authority business directories. “It’s good SEO practice to make sure that your company name, address, url, phone number etc. are consistent everywhere on the web. Many businesses lose SEO juice because they register their businesses under slightly different names, or inconsistent phone numbers.”
Choose domain URL extensions that reflect your target market. “If your focus is the French market, you should choose an .fr extension, as people tend to trust websites using their country’s extension vs. websites that use a more generic audience like .com or .net.”
Create social media profiles for your business from the start. “Search engines monitor brands’ social media activity carefully. If they see that your Facebook page is active, with customers interacting with your company, they’ll help you rank higher.”
“The main pitfall is to create a website that doesn’t feel local,” says Golinski. “If you’re creating a website for German customers, everything must be written in German. Localize your website.

Be wary of taking wrong turns in a digital maze
Google uses hundreds of variables to determine how web pages rank against one another for both paid campaigns and search engine result page listings.

“The two most important as they pertain to small businesses are content and backlinks,” says Caleb Ulku, search engine specialist and principal at Ulku Logistics, Inc. “Put a lot of content on your website, especially the homepage. A lot of small businesses will put up a simple homepage with no content.”

Ulku elaborates that small businesses should target 2,000 words on their homepages and make it a goal to add content daily.

“Make the content about the service you offer, the city you offer it in, and the customers you offer it to,” says Ulku.

What you’ll notice about these two steps is that they’re simple: you’re creating information that will be helpful for the people who want to find you. Precision will be essential — and ranking on that front page will be a priority.

“There are no secrets in SEO, and SEO isn’t an art,” says Ulku. “SEO is about giving Google’s algorithm the signals it needs to rank your website higher. SEO is a zero-sum game, meaning there are exactly 10 websites on the first page of results and almost 95 percent of clicks go to that first page. If you aren’t doing enough SEO to get onto the first page, then you’re just wasting your time and money.”

Make your content do the heavy lifting for you — and don’t cut corners
Write content for humans, but keep in mind that it’s a robot reading your webpage.

“The content should be properly structured such that Google’s search crawler categorizes it correctly,” says Timothy Platt, VP of IT Business Services at an IT managed service provider.

“These techniques fall into a bucket known as ‘on-page SEO’–the things you can do in your page content to rank better. This involves knowledge of HTML markup code.”

Platt encourages business owners to take the following steps:

Know your code. Be sure to use a descriptive tag, a well-formatted description tag, and include at least one header tag. Use human-friendly search keywords. It’s the words and short (or long) phrases that people would use to search for your website. If you don’t include your keywords in those structures, there’s a very good chance Google will miss the point of your page, or rank you on page 100 of the results, where nobody is ever going to find it.
Build a network. Off-page-SEO is the other important factor in ranking well in search engines. Backlinks are signals to search engines that your website is valuable. When someone links their website to your website, that’s their vote of confidence that your web page has something important to say. A web page with 10 incoming links is going to rank better than a page with two incoming links, in most cases. Links from industry-leading websites, the local chamber of commerce, and citations in online articles, are all examples of high-quality backlinks.
Focus on creating content that your customers care about, but be sure to craft it in a way that a machine can easily digest.

Turn your website into a knowledge hub

Many website owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers aren’t sure where to get started with SEO and SEM. The key is not to invest in one or the other but to think of both as complements to a holistic marketing strategy.

“In terms of marketing strategies, SEO is a long-term game while SEM tends to provide immediate results and traffic,” says Matt Bentley, CEO of SEO intelligence tool CanIRank.

“SEM requires ongoing investment. The moment you stop paying for Adwords, the traffic and leads stop. Although SEO requires a lot of effort over the long run, it provides ongoing traffic and enhanced brand awareness. Even if you don’t invest in your SEO marketing for a time, the traffic continues for years. In real estate terms, SEM would be renting an apartment while SEO would equate to owning a property.”

Long-term, think of your website as a knowledge hub. All content should interconnect and support readers’ needs. A strong internal linking strategy will tell search engines that you’re an authority in your industry.

Be a scientist

Luke Fitzgerald, Head of SEO at Irish agency Wolfgang Digital, encourages marketers to be aware that algorithms are ever-changing.

“SEO is organic,” says Fitzgerald. “You can’t pay to directly influence your ranking. On the other hand, SEM helps you pay for advertising within Google Search Results. Both are important, with the key difference that SEO is a longer-term strategy requiring patience and in-depth understanding of the various algorithmic, competitive, and technical factors that can influence your site’s organic performance. SEM brings an immediate reward.”

Dig into your data. Don’t cut corners. Focus on sustainable growth.

Most importantly though: Think like your customer
It’s very easy to fill up your website with the language you use between you and your peers everyday, but don’t forget that’s not normally how your customer speaks. As Guido Tijmensen of the Dutch SEO agency Digital Agency says, “A common mistake is that people use their website as their business card, including jargon.”

“The customer has to pick you instead of others, so it helps to put yourself in their shoes,” he says. If that’s hard to imagine, the internet provides tools to help businesses out. Answer the Public is a multi-lingual site where you can type in a search term that relates to your business, and get back the questions people search for.

If you fall into any one of the following categories, like:

the ones who don’t know much or anything about social media,
the ones who are interested but don’t know how to use it and
those who don’t believe in the value that a social media strategy can bring to any site or business
you must read this article to know how big a deal is social media and the enormous benefits of social media marketing.

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences. This is typically done via the Internet and mobile communications networks. Today this practice is being enjoyed by executives and professionals for brand exposure and marketing.

Do you make these mistakes to market your brand or services?

Use Yellow page ads that cost thousands of dollars, yet bring in little new business?
Spend money on direct mailers that also have limited results.
How about money spent on print advertising. How effective is it?
Are you spending lots of money optimizing your website but still have little traffic.
Spend money on Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns, with limited results.
Can you improve your business if you know:

What is being said about you?
What your customers think about your product or service.
What your customers really want.
What your competitors are doing.
How to stay up to date with the latest trends and developments.
How to make your business more profitable.
Nothing provides a better return on investment than having a network of people raving about you and it doesn’t matter what product or service you sell. So let’s have a look onto the benefits of social media viral marketing.

The value of Marketing through Social Media Channels

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships. It is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

What are the benefits?

It’s natural. No doubt you get natural links, your website is exposed to a large number of people. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.

It’s defensible. Social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.

It’s low-cost/high returns. Costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.

It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again. If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time.

SEO can be complicated — in many cases, overcomplicated. How many ranking factors are involved in generating strong organic search results? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred?

A quick search for “SEO ranking factors” will give you all of these answers and myriad others. There is a lot of information out there. And the reality is, while there are likely hundreds of variables working together to determine final placement, much of what is suggested is guesswork. And certainly, not all ranking factors are relevant to every business.

Point being, it is easy to get lost down an algorithmic rabbit hole. It’s information overload out there, and you can spend all your time on a research hamster wheel and achieve very little.

In this article, I want to simplify things and outline the four main areas you should be focusing on with your SEO. Really, when it comes down to it, SEO is actually pretty simple at a strategic level.

The four pillars of SEO

The four key areas of SEO that site owners need to consider are:

technical SEO: How well your content can be crawled and indexed.

content: Having the most relevant and best answers to a prospect’s question.

on-site SEO: The optimization of your content and HTML.

off-site SEO: Building authority to ensure Google stacks the deck in your favor.

Of course, these four areas have some complexity and overlap, but understanding your strengths and weaknesses in relation to them is key to focusing your efforts.

1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO can seem a little daunting, but really, what we are talking about is ensuring that a search engine can read your content and explore your site. Much of this will be taken care of by the content management system you use, and tools like Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl can explore your website and highlight technical problems.

The main areas to consider here are:

crawl. Can a search engine explore your site?

index. Is it clear which pages the search engine should index and return?

mobile. Does your site adapt for mobile users?

speed. Fast page load times are a crucial factor in keeping your visitors happy.

tech. Are you using search-engine-friendly tech or CMS for your website?

hierarchy. How is your content structured on your website?

If you are a small business using WordPress for your website, technical SEO should be something you can check off your list pretty quickly. If you have a large, bespoke website with millions of pages, then technical SEO becomes much more important.

Much of what is considered “technical SEO” here is actually part of your website design and development. The trick is to ensure your developer understands the interplay between website design, development and SEO and how to build a blisteringly fast and mobile-optimized site.

2. On-site SEO optimization

Your website should be optimized as a whole and at an individual page level. There is some crossover here from your technical SEO, and you want to start with a well-structured content hierarchy for your site.

Assuming you have a well-structured site, applying sensible optimization is again relatively straightforward. The main areas to focus on here are:

keyword research. Understand the language of your target audience.

descriptive URLs. Ensure each URL is simple and descriptive.

page titles. Use keywords naturally within the page title.

meta descriptions. Craft meta descriptions like they were ad copy to drive clicks.

content optimization. Sensibly use keywords and variations in your page copy.

good user experience (UX). Ensure your site is a joy to use and navigate.

strong calls to action. Make it easy for your users to know what to do next.

structured data markup. Tap into the latest SERP features to improve click-through rates.

When optimizing your site, take time to consider your customers. If you are a local business, then local SEO is more important, and your address and location become crucial optimization points.

With solid technical SEO in place, layering your on-page optimization is straightforward. Use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl and identify weaknesses and methodically work through your pages.

3. Content

Content is king. That’s the saying, right? It’s true in a way. Your website is really just a wrapper for your content. Your content tells prospects what you do, where you do it, who you have done it for, and why someone should use your business. And if you’re smart, your content should also go beyond these obvious brochure-type elements and help your prospective customers achieve their goals.

For service businesses, we can loosely break your content down into three categories:

Service content. What you do and where you do it.

Credibility content. Why a prospect should engage with your business.

Marketing content. Content that helps position you as an expert and puts your business in front of prospects earlier in the buying cycle.

It’s really important to realize that SEO is important for all of these kinds of content, but it is often only really considered for service-type content. SEO is often forgotten when it comes to credibility content like reviews, testimonials and case studies.

As a simple example, I recently renovated a Victorian-era house in the UK, and throughout the process, I was looking for various professionals that could demonstrate relevant experience. In this case, having a well-optimized case study showing renovation work on a similar house in the local area would serve as great long-tail SEO content — it also perfectly demonstrates that the contractor can do the job, which perfectly illustrates their credibility. Win-win.

Ensure you optimize all of your marketing content, including case studies, portfolio entries and testimonials — not just the obvious service pages.

A solid content marketing and SEO strategy is also the most scalable way to promote your business to a wide audience. And this generally has the best ROI, as there is no cost per click — so you are scaling your marketing without directly scaling your costs. This kind of SEO strategy is not right for every business, but when it is a good fit, it’s almost unbeatable.

Here are the key takeaways:

Optimize all content across the entire customer journey.

Determine whether content marketing via organic search is a good fit.

We still see way too many paint-by-numbers approaches to SEO, where local businesses are paying agencies to pump out blog posts that are strategically not a good fit. Ensure that all of your content is optimized, and if you are doing content marketing, ensure it is a good fit for your marketing tactics.

4. Off-site authority building

Eventually, all SEO rivers run to this one spot: authority building. Building your authority, in large part, involves link building. Links are still a crucial component to developing strong organic rankings; however, links can be the hardest part of SEO to get right.

It really is important here to get your link philosophy dialed in before you start, as this can truly make or break your link-building efforts. While link building is a deep topic that we can’t cover in depth here, if you can at least develop a positive link-building philosophy, you are already ahead of the majority of your competition.

The best way I have ever seen to describe the right link-building mindset was penned by the late, great Eric Ward: “Connect what should be connected.”

This philosophy is beautiful in its simplicity, and it serves to correct the “more, more, more” mentality of link building. We only want links from relevant sources. Often, this means that in order to scale our link-building efforts beyond the obvious tactics, we need to create something that deserves links. You have links where it makes sense for you to have links. Simple.

Wikipedia has millions of links, yet I am pretty sure they have never done any link building. This is because they have reams of useful content that gets linked. These are real, natural links that enrich the linking page, provide further context and serve as the real connective tissue of this hyperlinked world we live in.

This kind of natural link should be the backbone of your link-building efforts. This may mean you have to revisit the content on your site and create something of value first, but if you can nail that, then you are halfway home.

Any safe, scalable link-building strategy should be built on this mindset.

Key takeaways here:

Summary

SEO does not need to be overly complex. There are four key areas of SEO that you need to consider, and there is a structured, methodical process that can be followed to optimize your site.

I sincerely hope this post helps you cut through the noise, improve your rankings and generate more business from organic search!

• Choose a unique company name: You want people to be able to find you if they Google your company name, or something close to it.

If you choose a frequently used company name, this will be more difficult. For example, we initially named our company Richmond Performance Group. Poor choice, half of the businesses in the area are called Richmond something or other. Whitestone Partners worked better.

• Construct a strong website: Make sure that your website describes exactly what you do, whom you do it for and how you do it.

Use frequently searched terms in the descriptions. Embed the proper metadata, which consists of strong page titles, good page descriptions, and the right meta tags.

Remember, more is not always better.

Loading your site with hundreds of meta tags will hurt more than help — six to 10 is probably a good rule of thumb. The metadata should utilize frequently searched words, but should also tie very tightly to the content on your website.

• Embed a blog in your website: Add a high-quality blog to your website. Make sure that the blog is embedded in your website.

If you let someone else (for instance, Word Press) host your blog, you won’t build as much SEO when people visit it.

Post regularly, and, for example, post once per week. Writing the blog posts yourself will require discipline, but should not be a huge challenge for most organizations.

However, if you don’t have the time you can request permission to use content written by others or hire a ghostwriter at very reasonable rates.

Regardless of where you get the content, make sure it is high quality and that it is germane to what you do.

The content in your blog posts should be consistent with what is on your site. Ensure that new content flows continuously. It is better to have one new post each week than it is to post 52 times in one week and then allow the blog to sit idle for 51 weeks.

Finally, make sure that the titles contain highly searchable words and that they relate directly to the topic of the article.

• Drive people to your website: Nothing creates organic SEO like a consistent string of visitors to your website.

We have been very successful using a continuous string of automated Tweets to advertise the free content on our blog.

Tweets go out approximately once every four hours. When people click through to read the article they go to the blog embedded on our website and improve our SEO.

Obviously, this strategy will only work if you have a significant number of Twitter followers who are interested in the topics about which you are writing.

• Make your site more searchable: Including a site, map can be helpful. There are tools, such as Google Webmaster Tools, that skilled technicians can use to assess and improve the quality and searchability of your site.

Building and sustaining outstanding SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

However, in the right industry, it can be invaluable.

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