Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged content
Keep it Fresh!
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
There are a number of important reasons why you should be keeping the content on your website fresh. The most simple, and critical, reason is to keep your current and future visitors engaged and interested in what you have to say. Stale content, such as promoting a sale or talking about an event that took place 6 months ago, has the potential to really “turn off” visitors to your website.
Another important reason for updated content that I reference a lot with clients is the SEO value that it can provide. Simply put, search engines really like to “see” fresh, new content (text, graphics, charts, video, downloads, etc.) on a website.
They figure that if someone is taking the time to continually add new stuff to the website, some of it is probably fairly relevant information or data, and probably deserves to be ranked higher than a site which is rarely or never updated.
Providing updated content can also support good customer service within your organization, be necessary for regulatory or legal reasons, or help you maintain company/brand reputation, among others. Bottom line, you need to keep your website fresh! And if you don’t have the time, energy or skill to maintain a regular blog or create updates for your webpages, find someone who can help. Even a relatively small investment can pay big dividends down the road.
(Need some ideas for what to write about? Here’s an older post on how to “re-purpose” old marketing materials…)
Don't Be Scrooge With Outbound Links on Your Website
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
So, you’ve worked hard to get visitors to your web site. I know. (I’ve worked rather hard to get YOU to read THIS.)
And now you’re asking if you should provide outbound links. Well, should you?
What if visitors leave via those links, and then never come back? It’s a concern that many business owners and newer website administrators or writers have.
But let me tell you a secret: Visitors leave when they’ve seen enough. Period.
When they have read (or glanced at) your article or articles; whether they have read an interesting tid bit or have read every last word, they leave. Nothing you can do will stop this. Trying to box them into your site won’t stop them from leaving.
Besides, the truth is that many visitors aren’t even relevant to your objectives – as some of you reading this are undoubtedly to mine – so you might as well provide them with helpful directions or a pathway to a more appropriate web site. Who knows, maybe they WILL be quite relevant to your business later on, and will remember your usefulness?
Does this mean you link to direct competitors, or have outbound links all over the page? Certainly not. But spreading a little love by placing some outbound links makes your own site that much more relevant. If you have a good business, and you provide value on your website, you will get your fair share of customers!
A good related article, and outbound link I might add! Don’t be a link miser.
Open Rates
15 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
There different ways to measure the success of your email marketing or E-newsletter, but the most common and easiest understood metric is the Open Rate. Makes sense. If folks don’t open your message, they can’t be influenced by it!
But what about the simple brand awareness/recognition that you achieve by recipients simply seeing your piece in their inbox? (see, it’s complicated…)
So your open rate is obviously of supreme importance over the long term. It’s the first step towards “conversion”, whatever that may mean to you, and marketing success.
It is also fairly clear that you’ll never achieve a 100% rate, or anything close. Everyone’s time is too short and inbox too full for that to happen. But you shouldn’t spend much time worrying about the specific open rate, anyway. (What?? I thought you said it was vitally important a second ago? Bear with me for a moment.)
The reason the actual number is of limited significance is this: What constitutes a “good” rate? In comparison to what?
There are many different types of communications, both business-to-consumer and business-to-business. Business-oriented lists tend to have higher rates, partly because emails seen in the preview pane of Outlook (a common business email service) count as “opened”. Everyone has a different list profile, too.
If you send to a rented list of 100,000 people, and 10% (or 10,000) view your piece, that could be a smashing success. If however you send to your own personal house list of 50 addresses, and only 10 view your email (20%), you might consider this a failure!
What matters most is when or how your open rate changes from campaign to campaign. An increasing rate says you’re hitting the mark, a decreasing open rate points to a problem.
That said, there are certainly some tricks and tips that our writers have learned to improve open rates over time. We’ll share some of these in future posts to help you improve your rates, too!