Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged web content
Building Your Email List
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Building an email list is like building a business. Taking shortcuts to hurry the process along, such as turning to third-party mailing list rental or purchase, can backfire in a big way. Use your best selling tactics to promote your email list-building campaign, just like any marketing campaign you use to sell your products or services.
The potential ROI on email newsletters and other e-marketing campaigns is immense, often higher than any other marketing or advertising option. Which leads some to ask, why not just buy or rent a promising-looking list from a broker and start mailing to it? Because these addresses lack relevance, interest and trust, the three key ingredients that support every successful email marketing program. The reason why email marketing can produce such a high Return on Investment is because you typically have these three ingredients with legitimate email recipients. Otherwise:
* Relevance: You’re sending email to people who didn’t ask for it, which equals spam to most recipients, no matter how regulations may define unsolicited email.
* Interest: You also have absolutely no idea if they will be interested in your company, products or services.
* Trust: Unsolicited email can make recipients suspicious, which can cloud any future contacts they may have with your company.
At best, you might get a few nibbles, but the $$ spent on those email addresses could have been better directed elsewhere, like a search marketing program designed to attract browsers to your opt-in or preference center. More likely, enough recipients will complain via the spam button to prompt ISPs either to filter or block your email marketing.
As with any marketing campaign, your list-building program has an objective, strategies to achieve it, and ways to measure whether you achieved it. Yes, you want to create and build a mailing list. But with what kind of subscribers? Create a profile of your ideal email subscriber, and use it as a template to guide your strategies and tactics.
Also, be able to clearly define the content, format and frequency of your messages to be able to communicate the benefits of subscribing. Here are some strategies that can help you achieve your list-building goals.
1) Transparent and trustworthy email opt-in process: Permission is both the law in most countries of the world today and the expectation among email users. A transparent opt-in process explains exactly how to sign up for email, what recipients can expect and how you will use the information they give you. Provide this information on your opt-in or preference page with a link to your privacy policy.
2) Relevant, well-written and useful content: You can’t build a list without good content. (That is a primary focus for everything written by HTA, high-quality content is job #1!) As your program grows, track and analyze activity on your messages to see what does or does not engage subscribers.
3) Benefit-based invitations at every place where you encounter your customers or potential subscribers. First, tell subscribers what they’ll get in exchange for giving up their email address, “Sign up here for email-only discounts…” is far more enticing than “Sign up for our emails.” Then place this invitation where you will encounter customers or prospects, like posting on various pages of your site and seeing which one generates the most action. At Hat Trick Associates, we have quite a few other ideas on how to uniquely and effectively share your invitation that we share with clients.
You can measure your success in a number of ways. How many email subscribers do you want by what deadline? Setting a goal of 10,000 active subscribers in six months is good, but you need to factor in list churn and inactivity of up to 50 percent in order to achieve it. That could raise your goal to 15,000 subscribers in order to come up with an active base of 10K.
This sounds like a big challenge, but you increase your chances of gaining active email subscribers when you lay the groundwork first with a trustworthy opt-in process, engaging content, a wide network of invitations and careful list management.
25 Sources To Find Content For Your Next Blog Post
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
If you’re a blogger, you already know that sometimes the hardest thing to do is come up with new content for your blog. Finding ideas for your blog (especially if you regular publishing schedule like we do – at least one post a week on Mondays) can often lead to you not blogging at all, because you start hitting the wall when it comes to finding topics to blog about. So I thought you might find it useful to share 25 ways to use the web to find fresh content for your blog. And of course, most of these tips work just as well with creating content for your E-newsletter, email marketing, website copy, article marketing campaign, etc!
Blog Comments
1. Using a plug-in like CommentLuv allows your commenter to share their most recent post. I’ve seen blog titles that have intrigued me and clicked through to read, which then have given me ideas for a post of my own.
2. If you see a comment that really resonates and offers a unique viewpoint, contact the poster directly and ask if they’d like to guest for you and expand on their original comment. Very often they will say yes!
3. Similar to above, if you see a comment you disagree with, expand your own view into a post and offer reasons why your viewpoint is different than the counter-point.
Other Blogs
4. As pointed our in #1, CommentLuv is great for sharing the most recent post of a blogger, but not every blog uses it. So click through the URL of someone’s comment and see what they’re writing about, to see if you can gather ideas from there.
5. Blogrolls. While some have called blogrolls out of date, many bloggers still use them to share what they’re reading. Visit the blogs that your favorite blogger reads, and see what ideas you can glean from them.
6. Many bloggers have category lists for Top 10 Tips and other popular posts in their main navigation menu. Take a look and see what’s there, and use these to construct your own content.
7. Talking about popular posts, if a blogger has their most popular posts on display in the sidebar, click on a few to read and see what made these specific posts so popular. Then see how you can take this inspiration and apply it to your own posts.
Social Bookmarks
8. Delicious is a fantastic resource for finding blog content. Just type your topic into the Delicious search bar and you’ll find a ton of results from people that have saved articles or blog posts about your chosen topic.
9. Stumbleupon is a very cool add-on for your browser which lets you browse websites at random. You can land on some great content that will give you your own ideas for your blog.
10. While not quite as popular as it used to be, Digg still has some great shared posts and news on its site, and can be a great tool for finding new content ideas. Look at the most popular posts and see what new take on these topics you can offer readers.
11. BizSugar concentrates on small business news, and is rapidly gaining in popularity. If your blog relates at all to this niche, you can get some really good story ideas from here.
12. A mix of social community and bookmarking service, Blog Engage is similar to Digg and BizSugar with its voting system, but it focuses a lot on just bloggers and is another great starting point for subject ideas.
Blog Resources
13. One of my favorite blog communities is Scribnia. You can find authors and bloggers based on niches, and this can really help you target the content you’d like to get inspiration from.
14. Alltop offers a great collection of blogs in a myriad of different topics – if you can’t find something to write about there, then you really are stuck!
15. Still viewed by many as the Blogger’s Bible, Technorati has more than 133 million blogs registered within their site. Use the top topics or categories to discover content you can get ideas from.
16. Google Blog Search is a resource which offers a treasure trove of information on every topic under the sun. Much like Technorati and Alltop, use the search tool to find your interests.
17. Another popular resource from Google is their “Trends” portal. If you’re a quick writer, you can write a blog post about a trending topic right now – optimize it for SEO – and hopefully be found by those looking at the trends at that exact moment!
18. Junta 42 offers some great tips on content marketing – check out their articles for ways to get ideas for your own blog. find content for your blog
Social Networks
19. If you’re on Twitter, one of the best ways to find content for your blog is to jump into the weekly #blogchat discussion. Great bloggers, great topics – what more do you need?
20. Staying with the Twitter theme, take a look at what’s trending right now on the platform to see if you can get a post written quickly about it. Just don’t be overly spammy with your hashtags.
21. Once again with Twitter, Twitter Search is great for finding out what people are saying regarding the stuff you blog about – type in your keyword, and see if the current conversations give you inspiration to expand on their topics in a new blog posting.
22. A great application on Facebook is called Networked Blogs, which shares content from Facebook users with blogs and also the Networked Blogs directory itself. You can get a widget with different blogs in it, and use this to build some thoughts for your own content.
23. LinkedIn Groups are perfect for finding blog content. Find an appropriate question being asked there and then write a blog post as the answer.
24. Slideshare is more the just a place for file and document sharing has great presentations that are just chock full of ideas for you to take away and build several blog posts from.
25. In the same way as Slideshare, YouTube is also much more than just a video upload site – think about grabbing a Tips and Advice video, as an example, embedding it into a blog post, and then talking about what else could have been said or added to the video to make it an even better resource.
With these tips, you should be able to find plenty to talk about in your own blog. But for some folks, finding appropriate fresh content isn’t the problem – the time required to track it down, write and edit a blog post, and then uploading it – on a established schedule is the problem. But regular readers of our Hat Trick Associates blog already know that having well written, fresh content on your site very frequently is a critical KEY to having a superior SEO ranking – to convert current visitors and bring new ones in the future.
If you are having trouble finding the time to research and write your regularly scheduled blog, or don’t quite have the desire or writing expertise to get it done efficiently, look into our very cost effective blogging services.
Google's Instant Preview Feature Joins Instant Search
014 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Google wasn’t content with just having Instant Search, now it has introduced a new feature called Instant Previews. Searchers and web users can now browse a large instant “preview” of a site’s content by placing the cursor over the small magnifying glass displayed beside each listing. These previews are large and Google sometimes highlights a major paragraph or quote from each displayed site.
Searchers can get a general look at the layout and design of a site, with graphics and bold headlines usually seen from the preview. However, small print and the general content of the page can’t be read, so searchers will have to click through to your site if they want to read your information. Assuming of course, they don’t find what they’re looking for in the headlines or bold print!
Whether searchers will use this new feature remains to be seen, as even Google doesn’t hit a home run every time (Google Buzz, anyone?) but these instant previews could have some ramifications on who gets the “click through” to their site. One would also reason that getting the top spot in the rankings have diminished somewhat, if searchers can quickly preview all of the top 10 listings and then make their decision. So they might not click the top listing, but decide one lower down is worth clicking. This could make any listing on the first page more worth having, not just the top one.
This doesn’t really affect any of your SEO strategies and you should be optimizing for the search engines as usual. After all, getting those top rankings for your targeted keywords in the major search engines is what brings in the quality traffic to your site. In this regard, it’s business as usual.
However, Google’s Instant Previews does change the whole nature of SERPs or rather Google’s search results in that webmasters and marketers have another hurdle to get past before they get that final click. Searchers might click your top number one ranking preview and decide your page is not up to standard or it’s not what they’re looking for, and can quickly try out the other listings instead.
From Google’s perspective these previews could improve the “overall” quality of their results because searchers will come away happy, especially if they have not wasted their time clicking on a link, only to find it’s not what they’re looking for. Now they can easily find the right results more quickly and efficiently.
For the online marketer or webmaster, Instant Previews can be seen as another chance to get that all important click. They must make sure their page design is of high quality, and that pages feature a catchy headline which will draw visitors to their website. Highlighting a well-worded summary could also help attract more quality visitors. Placing your main keyword phrase in bold print so that it can be read from the preview is also a good idea going forward.
Needless to say, web marketers must still always keep their targeted keywords front and center. Highlighting them on your page in the main title is a given, but now you should make sure they can be read from the preview. This could possibly give you an edge with it comes to getting that click from Google!
On a more general note, these previews also add to the time searchers will spend on Google’s results pages. Google has been steadily focusing on this factor in recent months. Why? Because the longer a searcher stays on your page, the more likely they are to click your paid ads. Which makes perfect sense, if the searcher can’t find what they’re looking for in the “free organic listings”, they will look to the Adwords listings.
According to Alexa, the average time spent on Google in 2009 it was about 7 minutes…and today in 2010 that average has jumped to 14 minutes or more. And these numbers don’t include the full impact of Google Instant Search and Instant Previews yet, of course. That number should go even higher in the near future. And while this number still can’t touch Facebook’s average time of 30+ minutes, Google has still doubled the time it had only a year ago.
Previews will no doubt improve the effectiveness of Google’s SERPs, as searchers find what they are searching for more quickly, and leave as happy, more satisfied customers. However, for the webmaster and online marketer, keeping Instant Previews in mind when creating webpages is now a must. Here are some tips you can follow:
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Improve Your Graphics – These can really grab the searcher’s attention in the preview so it’s vital to have eye-popping graphics right next to your important information.
Create Great Headlines – Good headlines quickly capture the searcher’s attention and draws him/her to your page; just make them bold enough to be seen in Google’s previews.
Write An Informative Summary – Place your important information in a short summary which also captures the viewer’s attention. Entice these viewers to visit your site or page.
Take A Multi-Layered Approach – Just don’t aim all your marketing towards free organic search, but try video listings, news listings, image listings… to get other ways onto Google’s first page.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising – This is probably not what you want to hear, but paid listings through Google Adwords is another option. Besides, for extremely lucrative keywords, as more and more major companies throw major funds into SEO and Keyword Link Buying, organic search is not really free or even available to everyone for the most competitive keywords. For the small-time web marketer, paid listings in Google may be your only option, an option that is also quickly becoming quite costly for many.
Of course, how Instant Search and Instant Previews play out in the near future is still wide open to speculation.
Will searchers even use these added features in their daily searches? Or will users opt–out and go back to a more gentle, less hurried Google? Only time will tell. But one thing that all of us can be sure of, Google will be constantly rolling out new features and innovations just to make all our lives a little more interesting. And of course, we at Hat Trick Associates strive to always be a close to that cutting edge – to take advantage of the new rules, options or features being rolled out – so contact us today if you could use some web content and distribution assistance, to keep YOUR business ahead of the curve…and you competition!