War Room Strategies for Online Marketing by Linda Taylor

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Contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Pay-Per-Click (PPC). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Online Marketing Infograph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Make PPC Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

THE GREAT CIRCLE OF MARKETING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Social Media Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Creating Your Internet Advertising Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Creating The Twitter Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Craft a unique background for your page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Profile Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Avatars: Logo vs. Personal Photo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Create a Feedburner Account for Grasping and Following RSS Readers . . . . . . . . 10 Get Yourself Some Twitter Groupies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Brag about your subscribed numbers (When they’re large enough!) . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Get Help from Social Hubs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Hang up an Editorial Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Tactics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Copywritting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Keyword Optimization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Optimization Toolbox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 GET expert assistance with ppc campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 FINDING THE RIGHT PPC EXPERT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Viral Videos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Content Creation + Video Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Psychologically Motivating people to Share . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Easy Shareablility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 A Data-Backed Distribution Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

The Timing of the Tweet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Analytics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Answer Clients’ Questions on LinkedIn and Quora. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Make a Google Analytics Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Quora. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Customizing Your Google Analytics Dashboard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Connect Your Blog to Facebook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

The Analysis: Taking Note of What Works & What Doesn’t!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Get a Fan Base. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

How to Add Annotations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Give & Take with Customers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Get a Google AdWords Account. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Network on LinkedIn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Marketing With Email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Stay and Chat: Leave Twitter Tabs Open for “Live” Interaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Create a Go-Viral Social Media Contest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Social Media Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Comment Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Drip Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Select an Internet Email Server Provider (ESP). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Crafting a Personally Branded Email through the use of Templates. . . . . . . . . . . 29

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Collect Email Addresses in Exchange for SOMETHING COOL! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Bounce Rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Segment and Make Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Make a separate Landing Page for Each Ad Group. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

A/B Test Your Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

A/B Test Your Landing Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Construct a Drip Campaign to Acquire & Educate Clientele. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

The Five Second Test. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Drip Campaigns for Retaining Your Clientele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Content Advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

SEO / SEM Organic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Say What You Mean AND Mean What You Say. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Google Webmaster Tools Rock! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Start Bookmarking Content on Delicious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

The Keys to Researching and Defining Your Keywords. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Give Away Knowledge Freebies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Design Your Blog for Targeted Search. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Create a Corporate Blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Using Flat Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Enable Others to Share Your Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Track Your SEO Progress Using SEOmoz Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Write an e-book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Lead Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Let People Know that it’s Okay to Share... In Fact, Encourage It! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Using Landing Pages as Advertising Adhesive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 (CRO) Conversion Rate Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Create Conversion Goals & Funnels for Your Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Send Traffic to Landing Pages Instead of Your Homepage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Make Your Facebook ‘Like’ Page Conversion-Oriented. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Designing Your Facebook ‘like’ Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Getting a Vanity URL for Your Fan Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Learn From Your Users Using Live Chat and Feedback Widgets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Get rid of the ‘catch’! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Write Guest Posts for Other Blogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Guest Posting Tips. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Don’t Use Graphic Headers for Your Landing Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Link building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Honorable Mentioning Your Way to Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Another Benefit of Writing about Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Create an Infographic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Getting User Feedback at the Point of Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

A Few Final Thoughts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Segment Your Inbound Traffic Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

The final Take. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Page Quality Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

About our team. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Creating a Purpose and Call to Action for the landing Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Are you doing it right?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Reveal Your Site’s Weaknesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

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Introduction

kay, here’s the new reality. In the new digital economy, it doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer, restaurateur, mechanic, or cat juggler; you need to be online. Furthermore, you need to do it well. Think of it like this: the entire internet is nothing more than a digital ocean with a whole bunch of fishing lines all trying to pull in the big fish. How are you going to stand out? Frankly you’re going to need the best strategies, methods, and tactics out there to make it all happen online. So, where do you get those? In short, you’re either going to learn them on your own or you’re going to have to find an online marketing firm that can assist you.

When it comes to important decisions like who to choose to handle your company’s entire online marketing campaign (including social media outlets), this e-book is one of the most comprehensive criteria lists available. Use this e-book as a checklist when interviewing a potential company. Ask them about their level of experience and expertise in each of the areas discussed here and you will quickly realize whether or not they are a suitable fit. To be blunt, this e-book contains everything you need to know about online marketing (but probably didn’t know how or who to ask).

Before you hire an online marketing firm make sure you are able to determine if they are a good fit for you and your business. By the time you finish this e-book, you will be able to make this critical, looming decision once and for all.

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Online Marketing Infograph

In order to compete online, you’ll need to quickly get started executing some key points in these nine areas.

hey say a picture is worth a thousand words, in this case it’s possibly worth millions of dollars in revenue, if you simply master the applied techniques discussed in this e-book.

When reading a How-TO e-book, I usually look for a shortcut to the good stuff first... This infograph outlines everything you need to know about online marketing. Within this e-book you will find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had about online marketing. In addition, I have included several graphics to help me illustrate the key points that I will be discussing. This is the process that my company follows each and every day; this is exactly how we market our clients online. The system is so successful that it has come to be known as “THE ONLINE MARKETING WAR ROOM”.

to quickly get started executing some key points in nine specific areas.

THE GREAT CIRCLE OF MARKETING Nine of the main sectors of an online advertising plan are hashed out here. There are more than nine, but I am going to cover these nine big ones within this e-book. • Social Media Advertising • Pay-Per-Click • Viral Videos • Analytics • Marketing With Email • Organic SEM/SEO • Lead Generation • Page Quality Optimization • Content Advertising

In order to compete online, you’ll need

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Getting started is all about Social Media establishing your network base: registering accounts and Marketing

defining your style.

ocial media marketing is a huge topic, one which I could go into great detail about, but for the purposes of this e-book Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll just mention the three biggies that most businesses use: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Get in the game with all three, build a following, and learn how to create ads for your service across all three platforms. We will also be discussing other online services that are extremely useful in online marketing.

Creating Your Internet Advertising Platform Getting started is all about establishing your network base: registering accounts and defining your style (always a good idea before you start yammering in a tone unbefitting to your brand).

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The first stages of creating your internet advertising platform are the busiest, so make sure that the people you hire are real go-getters that consistently push the envelope in social media. Take your excitement and enthusiasm and kick things off as fast as you can. The sooner your online infrastructure is in place, the sooner you can start marketing your business effectively. The time to start is now and our professional team at BizChangerZ is ready to assist you.

Stake Your Claim on YOUR Brand Unfortunately, you can develop your website and personal brand/slogan and then as fast as you can say Facebook-Shmasebook, a brand squatter has stolen your unique name, tag line, and already has a social profile with

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your fresh new brand. Don’t put your genius to waste and get started claiming account names and custom URLs as soon as you are finished reading this e-book! Examples of URLs to claim: • youtube.com/YourBrand • linkedIn.com/YourBrand • flickr.com/YourBrand • twitter.com/YourBrand • facebook.com/YourBrand

Creating The Twitter Account

Quick Biz Tip There isn’t a single person who trusts a Twitter profile’s approach or content if they have the default Twitter egg as their picture. Even if you don’t have your final photo available, put up a personal picture or logo until you get it all together.

One of the best things about Twitter is that it acts as a personal landing page for your brand. Make sure to include keywords throughout the page (we will be discussing keyword development throughout this e-book) and a fully branded, high-resolution background. Make sure your avatar is relevant and always have a link to your actual website on there! It’s also a good idea to build authentication with your customers by tweeting a few of the big name brands that have used your services.

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Craft a unique background for your page Twitter has expanded the look of the homepage so that you can really showcase your brand. Make sure that your background is going to look great by hiring a professional to style your page. There are many specific guidelines that are followed to make sure your background is visible and looks good on every screen or device.

Profile Creation It’s vital that you carry your branding into every aspect of your profile’s content. Make sure to include the main keywords you want your brand known for. Those terms should be along the same lines as the words you want your company to be searched under. Always convey your key business core values so people get a good feel for your company through your Twitter profile. Last but not least, you’ll absolutely need a link to your website. Redundancy is the mother of better memory.

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Avatars: Logo vs. Personal Photo Whether you use your logo or a personal photo for your avatar depends on whether or not you will be the sole tweeter for your company. If you are the sole tweeter, then including your logo beneath your profile picture is a good start. If there will be many of you tweeting with separate profiles, then all of you should have your company’s logo as your full avatar. If this creates confusion pertaining to differentiating the person tweeting, then just add your initials to the end of the tweet. For example, mine might be:

Ask people to subscribe to your blog and get their contact information for future reference.

Great day at #BizChangerZ today; helping businesses grow & rethink potential! MB Create a Feedburner Account for Grasping and Following RSS Readers Feedburner is a mechanism used to keep tabs on your RSS subscribers. Make sure you have a Google account first, and then follow these steps:

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Step 1. Go to Feedburner.com Step 2. Enter in your blog’s URL to auto-populate the RSS feed (Your blogging software has already crafted an RSS feed specifically for your blog.) Step 3. Publicize --- In the email subscriptions area so you can get the email form code Step 4. Now you are able to get the URL code for your original Feedburner RSS feed; go to the top left and hit the tiny RSS icon

To get even more details on setting up your Feedburner RSS feed check this out: http://bitly.com/lSumby Basically, you really want/need people to go ahead and subscribe to your RSS feed. Here are a few suggestions to help you out: • Put the famous neon orange RSS feed button on your page. • Make sure that there is a place for people to enter their emails. This way you can ask people to subscribe to your blog and get their contact information for future reference.

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Get Yourself Some Twitter Groupies Twitter groupies are much like band groupies; they make you appear popular and in demand, not to mention boost your ego now and then. (That never hurts!) However, Twitter groupies prefer to be called a more sophisticated name: followers. You gain followers by following other people so that your tweets become visible to them; try tweeting great tweets that are bound to be retweeted to greatly expand your exposure to the community. Furthermore, always use hashtags (i.e. placing a # symbol before a keyword) so anyone on Twitter can find your tweets via the search function. Twitter is actually a great source of media marketing and is an excellent PR tool.

Brag about your subscribed numbers (When they’re large enough!) It helps pique people’s interest when they click on your site and you have 1,000 people subscribed. Nobody wants to be left out on information that everyone else is getting, so post this on your blog when you’ve reached a real healthy number. A good beginning range would be 700 – 1,000. Once you’ve acquired that, head back to Feedburner.

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They have a widget called FeedCount that acts as both a social proof indicator and an RSS subscribe link.

Get Help from Social Hubs One of the biggest challenges new companies face is getting traffic to their site. Submitting great blog posts to social content sites like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, SERPd, and Mixx is a surefire way to get a traffic boost. If the community likes your post, they vote for it; but make sure you don’t make boring posts or it can do the exact opposite of your intention to increase traffic. Be a good social hub citizen and submit compelling content full of worth and value. Each social content site has a different audience, thus they like different types of content. To get the most out of each site, learn what types of content are usually voted up and try to shape your own content similarly. That could mean using an infographic, list, how-to, etc.

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Every successful content strategy requires the use of an editorial calendar.

Hang up an Editorial Calendar

The Timing of the Tweet

I mean this figuratively and literally, because in this day and age, one can have an electronic calendar pretty much anywhere. However, no matter what form it’s in, almost every successful content strategy requires the use of an editorial calendar. It is ever so helpful in determining deadlines and organizing your schedule. You may be surprised at how fast it fills up.

Schedule your Twitter time according to the time frame in which your target consumers are most active online. When dealing with different time zones, it is helpful to schedule your tweets using tools like Hootsuite or Timely if you’re not going to be awake or available at the time. However, don’t forget that Twitter is a social site, so try not to schedule tweets when no one will be around to chat with prospective clients.

Think of it almost like a bucket list; all of things you need to do if you want to have an awesome social media marketing strategy and a business that utilizes that strategy in the best possible way (or else your business could kick the bucket). Some of the things you might want to jot down in your handy new editorial calendar would be: • Weekly blog posts on your corporate blog • Monthly guest posts (discussed in further detail later on) • Half-days devoted to research on blogs for the upcoming month • Time reserved for answering questions on LinkedIn

9 a.m. PST is a fantastic time to tweet because it is concurrent with multiple times during the day where people nationally and internationally are focusing more on Twitter than their work. Don’t tell the boss! This time encompasses: • The start of the workday on the North American west coast: people are most likely drinking and driving their way late into work. (Drinking coffee of course, what did you think I meant?) • Lunchtime on the east coast • The end of the work day in the United Kingdom

• Occurrence of quick and easy posts to be posted on a reoccurring basis

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Answer Clients’ Questions on LinkedIn and Quora Answering questions on LinkedIn and Quora isn’t just answering questions; it’s building client relationships. By answering people’s questions, you can change a person with a question into someone you have a dialogue with, allowing you to communicate with them in the future through the site’s internal messaging system.

Establish yourself as an expert by answering questions on LinkedIn (shown above) and Quora.

Quick Biz Tip Social hubs are at their most powerful when they are connected with other social hubs. So don’t forget to connect your Quora account to your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that your followers can mix, recruiting more followers for all of your accounts.

If you do this right, you’ll soon have a reputation of being an expert. You want people to see you as a regular question answerer, replying with strength and authority. Never just answer to answer; only reply if you have something valuable to say. (Be sure to make your answer clever and original!)

Quora Quora.com is basically a Q&A site allowing you to engage in conversation with other members by answering questions asked by the community. When you set up your profile, define

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your area of expertise and opt to automatically follow conversations on topics relevant to you. One of the advantages of using Quora is that all of its content is public and indexed by Google, meaning that it can be a road leading to a nice trickle of web traffic.

Connect Your Blog to Facebook Having an inactive Facebook page doesn’t look very good to potential customers. You can avoid this problem by connecting your blog to your Facebook account. You can do this using the Networked Blogs Facebook app. Add the app to your Facebook page by clicking the “Add to my page” link. Follow the instructions. Now that you’ve added the Networked Blogs Facebook app, whenever you post something on your blog, a link will automatically appear on your Facebook wall. Not only does this constant stream of activity make your wall look busier, but it’s just another way for people to be exposed to your content.

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Quick Biz Tip Are you really going to fax someone? Probably not. Don’t ask people for information that you’re not going to use immediately. Once you get rid of the useless questions, you can replace them with more useful ones.

Get a Fan Base You should try to get a fan base on your page because: • It gives visitors social proof that people like your company so it’s not the Facebook equivalent of an empty restaurant. • You need at least 25 fans to get a vanity URL.

To establish a fan base: Invite your personal Facebook friends. If everyone in your company does this, you’ll hit 25 pretty fast, and you’ll probably exceed it. Once you hit 25, you can get a vanity URL and it’s game on!

Give & Take with Customers Usually, you have to give to take. The same principle applies for getting customer data. Give them something so you can collect their data. It’s a win-win situation. Some of the things you can offer customers include: • An e-book you’ve written

Remember that any request for data is a barrier to your visitor’s entry. Your success correlates directly between the amount of data you’re asking for and the size of the prize. Ask yourself: is it a fair exchange?

Network on LinkedIn LinkedIn is a huge social networking site that lets professionals make and maintain business relationships. Networking on LinkedIn is great for establishing connections with potential clients, investors, and more. Here are some things you can do to extend your reach:

Join Groups on LinkedIn

• A webinar registration Use a landing page to trade something useful in exchange for your customers’ names and emails.

It is imperative that you use a landing page when you’re trying to get customer data to prevent visitors from wandering off and losing focus on what they came there for.

LinkedIn requires that you have a mutual connection with someone (kind of like being friends on Facebook) before you

• A useful report • A whitepaper

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can message them. Ask your personal connections to try to connect you with others and join groups to make a large amount of connections at a time. Once you are part of a group, you can message anyone in that group. Feel free to message away, but be sure to never spam people.

Always be monitoring

Ask Questions

The numbers in the parenthesis will change in real-time letting you know that keyword has just been tweeted.

When you ask questions, you can gain access to large numbers of people, build your network, and associate your company/ brand with a specific type of content. You can ask up to 10 questions a month on the free account, so pace yourself but don’t forget about it either.

Be a Thought Leader and Start A Group Building your own group can be time consuming, but it’s a great way to attain credibility. Find a niche relevant to what you do and start inviting people. If it’s successful, it can be just like your Facebook Fan Page.

Stay and Chat: Leave Twitter Tabs Open for “Live” Interaction What are the best keywords to spark a conversation about your business’s purpose?

Those keywords should be very close to the keywords you will chose for your PPC campaign and organic search. (Both of which we will explain in full detail.) Do a search for them in Twitter and leave the results open in the tab.

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Leaving these tabs up allows you to be “always on” so you can catch the conversations in real-time. To make things easier on you, have your marketing company do this for you. As soon as they see a conversation or comment up on your tabs, they can notify you to jump in so you can exhibit your knowledge in your area of expertise.

Make It Easy Bookmark your favorite searches on Twitter and add them to your browser toolbar so that they are easily accessible.

Create a Go-Viral Social Media Contest You can gain easy exposure for your brand through contests. It’s crucial that you pick a prize considered valuable by your target audience’s demographic. The prize can

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be either a product or a service: although it doesn’t have to be something that your company sells/does, it should definitely be related.

Using the Twitter app @Anywhere, ask people to retweet your contest information.

Contests can be made “viral” by requiring people to share as part of the entry process for the contest. Examples of this include: • Twitter “Tweet This” Box: As part of their contest entry, ask people to retweet your contest information. In order to do this, you need to set up a Twitter @ Anywhere app. • Facebook Like Box: By requiring people to “Like” you to enter the contest, you can acquire more fans for your Facebook page. This widget is easily used and customized; and its embeddable code is available from Facebook share.

Social Media Monitoring Real-time social media monitoring is not only cutting edge, it’s the single most powerful thing you can do in online marketing right now. If you decide to hire an online marketing company, make sure they provide this service so that you can stay in the game at a high level!

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You need to know what people are saying about your company, you need to converse on the web, and your company needs its own individual online persona. You could try to run all of the programs mentioned in this guide and more, respond to honorable mentions, and analyze your own data, but do you really have the time and resources for that?

Comment Management Just about all blog software offers, in some capacity, the ability for your readers to leave comments about your post, so why would you need a 3rd party comment management service? Many of the reactions and comments posted on a blog never make it to the blog itself – the source of the conversation. Comment Management tools provide all the features you would need in addition to also pulling in mentions/citations of your post from around the internet. In short, when someone reads a post on your blog, they can see comments made directly on the post as well as mentions made on the post on other sites like Facebook or Twitter.

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Is a comment management tool right for your blog? You need to ask yourself how much of your social engagement is happening off your blog, and you also need to ask if you feel it will add to the user experience to have the ability to see a collected list of on- and off-site interactions. For many blogs, citing comment/reaction counts are simply matters of social proof and popularity. For others, it’s an attempt to harvest all the conversation about a post at the source. At Disqus.com, off-site references to your content on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube are pulled in as “Reactions”

To help you decide, here are the 2 main comment management tools to consider:

Livefyre • The Livefyre system makes it easy to facilitate actual conversations in the comments • Built on chat technology, every comment, image, video, and action within Livefyre happens immediately, in real-time • No extra click, no refresh required. With moderation tools, social integration, and a comment voting system, Livefyre gives you everything you need to turn a casual online following into a passionate and engaged community

network from your content • Friend-tagging, social sign-in, and syncing options make your content the central hub of the conversation

Disqus • Comments become live discussions with real-time posting and updating • It fully integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and more • Comments can be threaded • The moderation dashboard is easy to use • Off-site references to your content on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube are pulled in as “Reactions” • Lets people login, comment, and share using social services they already use and love, a quick way to show off what your community is made up of • The community box gives everyone a summary view of the activity and people participating on the site • Disqus reaches 200 million people every month across half a million websites and communities on the web. Keep the conversations lively by connecting your audience with the millions of others already on Disqus

• Readers can access their entire social

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Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

The main reason to use PPC is simply to get people to your landing page.

kay, let’s face reality: pay-per-click strategy (PPC) is just as complex as social media; but, like anything else in life, you need to know the basics.

Whatever you want to achieve and however you’re going to get there needs to be defined by specific, measurable goals. Here are some good examples:

Make PPC Goals

Goal #1: Redesign and overhaul the website in 2 months.

Your first task in achieving an effective PPC campaign is to start with goals. What do you want to achieve? Increase conversion rates on your PPC ads? Increase sales revenue? How about more clicks? Are you trying to build email lists? You cannot accomplish a goal unless you set a goal to begin with. Look, the only reason to do PPC is simply to get people to your site or to a landing page with a special offer. You know, like the one that most likely led you to this very e-book!

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Goal #2: Decrease bounce rate by 20% in 4 months. Goal #3: Increase conversion rate by 50% in 6 months.

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Strategy Conversion rate increase happens when and if customers find what they are looking for after bouncing from a PPC ad. You’re going to have to bid on PPC keywords, so you need to know that the bid rate is based primarily on the popularity. As of today, the keyword “insurance” is a whopping $54.21 per click but with some skill building you can get that down significantly.

To get the most out of your A/B tests, use Google Website Optimizer.

Whatever keywords you choose, please know that they need to be optimized and tested to reveal the right combination. It’s all about results! These decisions need to be made based on data, not emotion. Strategy + Data = Campaign Optimization

Tactics To optimize your landing page, make sure your message screams at you by eliminating parts of the graphics and layout that do not compel you to take action. The landing page from your PPC ad has one purpose in this life and one purpose only; and that’s to make things happen in terms of converting leads into sales. Here are some of the initial

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tactics that you should master in order to make big things happen in PPC land: • A/B Testing: Always create more than one ad — Create at least two or three and then test and track the copy. (Take a look at Google’s Website Optimizer for help here.) • SEO: Google checks everything you do... Always remember that. Do the right things via SEO compliance issues so that you get a good Quality Score on all that you do. • Ad Copy Testing: Create several approaches to your ads and then test and track, test and track. Yes, I’ve said it before; but nothing is more important than testing and tracking. Only real-time data will tell you what works and what doesn’t. • Keyword Optimization: The keywords on your landing page need to be in your ad copy as well. If they are not, Google will literally penalize you! Always keep in mind that Google sees what you do right and what you do wrong. If you do it right it can help you get the lowest possible bid price the next time you do a PPC with those words. Google is funny like that.

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Copywritting Eye-popping copy is king! Have fun and be creative with it. Let’s look at some varying levels of copy quality.

MEDIOCRE COPY

Don’t buy Way Cool Product until you read this! It’s an OK ad that tries to get people’s attention and get them to your site to buy the Way Cool Product, but it could better by changing the verbiage.

BETTER COPY

“the last time” – strongly suggest that it happened before, so do the math!

VERY BEST COPY

Before you buy Way Cool Product, read this. (Sold out in 24 hours the last time!) Starting the ad with “Don’t buy” can plant a thought you do not want in their head. The bottom line is this: write-test-track-revise...

Keyword Optimization

Don’t buy Way Cool Product until you read this. (Sold out in 24 hours the last time!)

Use Keyworddensity.com to quickly count your keywords on any given page. You can also evaluate A/B pages side-by-side!

“Sold out in 24 hours the last time” – We are strongly suggesting that it will sell out again. Remember, scarcity sells.

“Don’t buy Way Cool Product until” – This plants the idea into the mind of the reader that they were already planning on buying Way Cool Product (which should be true as they were searching for it online right?)

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Keyword density (the percentage of those keywords when divided into the total number of words on a page) is a big deal in SEO. It’s good to know the numbers on where you stand and how or where you’ve used those keywords. Ask yourself these questions about your landing page and PPC ad copy:

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• Do your keywords make sense? • Are they the best choices for my objectives? • Do the words I’ve chosen flow properly?

Optimization Toolbox Like with any trade, you’re going to need a toolbox: one for keyword optimization. You need to know your keyword density on your website or in your PPC copy in order to ensure that the search engines know it too! Here’s your toolbox starter kit; get them and get good at using them — it’s that easy.

Now that you know a bit about PPC, you may acquire customers quite quickly. However, most people need a little help with their PPC rate. Even if it’s not bad, it can always be better, right? If you’ve got the money and you don’t have the time or PPC rate you’d like, then it’s time to bring in the experts. Sticking with a professional for PPC campaigns will make sure that you aren’t throwing hard earned money out of window on bogus (or massively popular) keywords.

• Google Trends

FINDING THE RIGHT PPC EXPERT

• Google Insights

While this is not the Be-All-End-All Guide on PPC, it will definitely get you speaking the lingo and provide you some insight on hiring the right company. Ask questions from the content you’ve learned here. Ask them how many accounts they’ve managed and how much money in PPC campaigns they’ve actually went through. What were the results? Are they Google AdWord Certified? Knowing what to ask will help you get the results you need to meet your goals.

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool • SEO Book - Keyword Suggestion • SEO Book - Keyword Density Analyzer • Keyword Discovery • Wordtracker.com • KeywordDensity.com Use Google AdWords to carefully choose your keywords based on competition and search frequency.

GET expert assistance with ppc campaigns

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Viral Videos

Having a successful viral video campaign requires both extraordinary content creation and proper video distribution.

arketers invest millions per year producing branded video content. Why? To engage their audience with such distinctly branded and unique content that’s so awesome that they’ll have to share it with their friends. Making and maintaining a successful viral video campaign is often referred to as an art — but I can guarantee you that there are some very scientific ways to getting people to share.

Content Creation + Video Distribution Having a successful viral video campaign requires both extraordinary content creation and proper video distribution. First, you have to find out what your target audience likes to talk about and/or share. What kinds of

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books, movies, videos, and celebrities do they like? The key to your video achieving ‘viral’ status is identifying your target audience’s viral triggers. A viral trigger is what turns viewers into sharers. While it’s a one experience watching a video yourself, it’s quite another to share it with someone else. Examples of viral triggers are humor, randomness, sex appeal, inspiration, etc. However, you’re not the only business expecting the virus to spread and have their video to go viral. What makes your viral video ‘virus’ so special?

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Psychologically Motivating people to Share There are three main ways to get your video to viral status:

Touch their emotions

Look for alternatives to YouTube in order to give your videos a fighting chance to stand out and reach people. Don’t let your video get lost in the massive content that YouTube provides.

As humans, one of our basic needs is to share our emotions. To play on this, have your video capture an emotion that will resonate with a large population of people. If the emotion is strong enough, they’ll share it with their friends — not only sharing your video, but their emotion.

Identify with them Another factor in video sharing is identity and self expression. When you check out someone’s profile on Facebook, one of the easiest ways to get to know them is looking at their Likes. What videos, quotes, people, and businesses do they Like? Give your video a clear message so that people will want to associate themselves with it by sharing it. Meanwhile, keep in mind that this works the other way too. If your video has a negative or unrelatable message, people won’t want to share it because they won’t

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want to be associated with it.

Teach them something new People love to learn new things. If your video is informational in nature, then make sure that it contains very interesting information and a lively presentation that is fresh and new. If people find it interesting enough, then they’ll share it with their friends.

Easy Shareablility When you think of video sites, the first site that probably comes to mind is YouTube. YouTube is a great place to share your video, but it can easily get lost in the midst of YouTube’s massive amount of content. So, in addition to sharing your video on YouTube, don’t forget to share it on smaller sites so it can get more attention e.g. Devour, PopScreen, and VodPod. When scouting out smaller sites to share your video on, don’t forget to check whether their video players have built in share features. Don’t waste your time if they don’t because it’s highly unlikely that anyone would go through more trouble than the click of a button to share your video. You

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? ? ?

Which sites have the most sharing for my type of content?

Which users am I targeting?

What encourages my users to share?

want your video to be as contagious and communicable as possible. (Like a ‘virus’, remember?) Now, just roll your shoulders back and allow your control-freak-nature to take a backseat and allow people to download, embed, comment on, and whatever else they want to do with your video.

already gone viral, don’t stop advertising it. Remember, we don’t just want this virus to become a common cold; we want a full force pandemic on our hands!

A Data-Backed Distribution Strategy When deciding on how to distribute your video, ask yourself these questions: • Which sites have the highest amount of sharing for my type of content? • Which users am I targeting? • What encourages my users to share?

Instead of counting on just video sharing websites, use a multi-platform approach: send it to well-known bloggers and post it on your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. Get your video out in as many ways as possible! Once your viral video campaign is underway, assess which sharing outlets are working best and shift your resources to focus on those. Even if your video has

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Analytics

There are many paid analytics services — but for starting out, Google Analytics is the way to go.

Make a Google Analytics Account The first thing you need them to do for analytics is set up a free Google Analytics account. There are many paid analytics services — but for starting out, Google Analytics is the way to go.

Customizing Your Google Analytics Dashboard Google Analytics is a very powerful, yet complex tool. The majority of people don’t have the time to be digging around in their data and usually only require a few fundamental metrics for their reporting needs. However, customizing your Google Analytics Dashboard opens up a whole new window of opportunity for analysis. Your marketing expert should be expected to

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do this, so don’t let them tell you that it’s not necessary. You’re hiring them to do the tedious stuff you don’t have time for. How your marketing company gets it done is their choice, but getting it done is their responsibility to you. So don’t let them dodge their responsibilities! The first thing you need to do when customizing your dashboard is figure out what you want reports on. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, but don’t be afraid to take big bites either. Create a report for each metric and add them to your dashboard so that you can access all the data from one screen whenever you need a marketing report. (So when you get a marketing report from your online marketing company, it should look pretty darn close to that.)

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The Analysis: Taking Note of What Works & What Doesn’t! When a traffic spike is noticed (your online marketing company should have their own people monitoring this in real-time), add an annotation note into Google Analytics, referencing the reason for the traffic spike. This not only allows you to have a site history, but it allows for further analysis of such data that can show you how to recreate such traffic spikes using proven methods from the analysis such as a great blog post, heavy press coverage, a PR event, etc.

Get a Google AdWords Account All you need to do to get your AdWords account up and running is to follow Google’s step-by-step guide. This may seem like an obvious thing to do; but AdWords can be complicated and it’s best to get a head start on this. If a company doesn’t mention the obvious (such as this) they’re probably not tech-savvy enough to know the more complicated features.

How to Add Annotations Google Analytics will show you your traffic spikes so you can track your progress in real-time.

It’s easy! You can either open a notes panel by clicking on the small, gray drawer handle under the chart and click the “+ Create new annotation” link, or simply click directly on a blue dot on the chart and click on the link within there. Let’s dream big, shall we? One of these days when your company is worth billions, all those annotations you made will tell a great success story of how you made it to the big leagues. I mean, who doesn’t want to have a billion dollar book sitting on their bookshelf?

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Marketing With Email

If your company is new to email marketing, then I would suggest starting out with Mail Chimp.

ou’re going to have to master the art of email advertising — an alternative (but never a replacement) to social media marketing. For now, let’s focus on a much keener concept called a drip campaign (this can ultimately make the distinction between a heavily interested following or a group of people who seem to have already clicked off of your page and forgotten all about you).

Drip Marketing Drip Marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. These messages often take the form of email marketing, although other media can also be used. Drip marketing is

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unique from other database marketing in two ways: (1) The timing of the messages follow a pre-determined course and (2) the messages are dripped in a series applicable to a specific behavior or status of the recipient. Now this is all very interesting and helpful, but how are we going to pursue “drip campaigns” through email if we don’t have any contacts to actually send the emails to? Stick with me and we will discuss tips on how to increase your email contact list by many different means including: generating webinars, utilizing e-books, and simply requesting that people follow along with your blog posts.

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Select an Internet Email Server Provider (ESP) If you read this and you’re thinking “really, another email server?” All I can say to you is, “yes!” You need to go with the experts in this area instead of trying to create an in-house system. Being responsible for can-spam is almost a full-time job. Using email software that comes with your word processor is not created for avid email marketing and is a quick way to get blacklisted. With a good online marketing company, they’ll have their own experts create the right system for you.

Get started using Mail Chimp for free until you decide that you need to upgrade to a paid account.

If your company is new to email marketing, then I would suggest starting out with Mail Chimp. (Bonus: it’s FREE! Use the free service until the your business out-grows its functionality and then upgrade to a paid account.) I recommend Campaign Monitor if you are design firm. This server has created a product essentially pinpointed on web designers. I’ve compiled a list of ESPs for you. The wealth of knowledge and choices out there can seem a bit overwhelming at first but each company has unique benefits.

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• VerticalResponse • StreamSend • SubscriberMail • Silverpop • Newsweaver • MailerMailer • ExactTarget • Campaign Monitor • EmailLabs • BrontoListrak • Salesware • NewZapp • MailChimp • Campaigner • GraphicMail • Topica • Pure • GetResponse • EmailDirect • Inxmail • Xert • Contactology • Newsberry • Constant Contact • Emma • iPost • YesMail • Net Atlantic • ContactLab • Sendloop • Elite Email • Vidi Emi • CommuniGator

• Boomerang • RatePoint • Pixelnews • Mobilize Mail • CoolerEmail • iContact • Delivra • TailoredMail • Pinpointe • Concep • Blaynmail • SpinnakerPro • Act-On Software • eMailCampaigner • SimplyCast • Benchmark Email • Sign-Up.to • Sailthru • Artegic AG • IMN • BlueHornet • Email Transmit • Montpellier • eConnect • ExpertSender • SendLabs • L-Soft • VRVirtual • Alterian • Mayoris AG • Cyberimpact

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Crafting a Personally Branded Email through the use of Templates Once you sign up for your email server, find their template section and get started customizing. (All of the templates they provide you will be quite dull. This is an area where you can loosen your budget just a bit.) When you upgrade your plan, they will provide you with more cultured templates; this makes all the difference in the world. When customizing the email template, you don’t have to be absolutely spotless, but go ahead and compare it to the homepage of your website and see how they compare. You want to continually keep your brand the same across every advertising medium that you use.

Collect Email Addresses in Exchange for SOMETHING COOL!

Here are some examples of the HTML templates that Mail Chimp provides.

A landing page should be all about collecting something of value from your audience. The most effective information collection campaigns always offer something in exchange for information in the form of a gift. (Like free access to your e-book! — Sound familiar?) If you choose not to offer anything, then post your Twitter

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“Follow Me” link and/or Facebook “Like” link and encourage them to stay connected and see more posts from you there. If you are planning on releasing a brand new product or service, make sure to start collecting contact information from your customers. If you already have contact information, start sending out reminders and keepable goodies (e.g. discounts, coupons, information, etc.) for your upcoming product launch. Here are a few ideas: • Make sure to have a simple and fun-to-read statement about your upcoming product and then offer them a free copy of your latest e-book • Offer your customers expert advice for any and all future business issues that they may stumble upon • Give your customers a driving force behind why they absolutely must sign up, right now! For example:

Hey Guys, we’re having a beta period and I would like for you to be a part of my beta team! Make sure to sign up now because there are only X spots left!

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Segment and Make Lists “Go skydiving with InFlight!” This would be great copy for our sample company, unless their target audience is afraid of heights! Segmentation is communicating to your targeted customers in a way that is relevant to them. Dividing the customers in your email program according to demographic, psychographic, and behavioral patterns can be a complex, often tedious, process. It’s even more challenging to make sure you move people between lists when their status changes, such as from a free customer to paying customer, or an occasional client to an investor, etc. Segmentation may seem daunting, but you have to start somewhere. Your marketing expert should begin by drawing some distinction between your clients: by gender, by progress through sales process (e.g. new, interested, registered, purchaser), or by the type of account (e.g. free vs. paying). When you start brainstorming for new email campaigns, break those huge lists of emails

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up by further segmenting them into different lists or subgroups branching out from your original lists.

A/B Test Your Emails Some email providers let you run A/B split tests on your emails. Doing an A/B split test is a great way to find out what triggers and branding your customers respond to. Though the idea of using exciting subject lines is tempting, it’s best to go with the simple stuff because not only does simple usually work better, but it also gives it a lesser chance of being picked up by spam filters. Some of the things you can differentiate in the A/B test include (but are certainly not limited to): • Subject Lines • Day of the week • Time of day • Who the sender is (i.e. From:)

Construct a Drip Campaign to Acquire & Educate Clientele Not all leads (potential customers) are immediately ready to commit at first sight. It

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often takes several interactions or branding impressions before they are ready to trust you enough to use your service or buy your product. This delay can be due to bad timing, the need to do extra research, or just the hectic pace of everyday life.

Subscriber Enters Their Information on a Smart Capture Form

Subscriber Receives Initial Email

Subscriber Receives Email Two Weeks After Initial Sign-up

This being said, you need to stay at the top of their mind so that when they need you, you’re the first person/company they think of. One of the best ways to do this is through a drip campaign. As mentioned earlier in this e-book, a drip campaign is a succession of emails designed to guide your clientele closer to you. Typically, they are automatically programmed to email people after they agree to receive your content (they are often referred to as autoresponders). Here are a couple of ways to attract people into opting-in for your drip campaign:

Subscriber Receives Email 1 Month After Initial Sign-up This acquisition drip campaign diagram can also be used as a retention drip campaign.

• A checkbox to receive a free series of tips when they sign up for an account or order one of your products/services. By giving people some useful information, you increase the likelihood of them purchasing your products or upgrading to a paid plan.

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• Offering more information on the subject on pages with heavy traffic and subject matter pertaining to your company’s specialty. For example:

“To find out more, all you have to do is click here!” Drip Campaigns for Retaining Your Clientele Getting clients is one thing — keeping them is quite another. A good online marketing firm should help you do both. Your objective for a retention drip campaign is to maintain a lasting relationship with your customers. Despite the difference in objective, a retention drip campaign employs many of the same techniques as those for an acquisition drip campaign.

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SEO / SEM Organic

There’s only two ways to make a search listing: you either pay for it or you get there organically.

ery likely, your first question is: what the heck is Organic Search Marketing? The number one mission of organic search marketing is to put you on the A list of answers to something a given searcher is looking for. • Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is about showcasing your product, service, or company as the best answer to anyone seeking the answer to that question through PPC ads, etc. • Organic SEO / SEM focuses on the search results that occur naturally when anyone types in a query into virtually any search engine.

There’s only two ways to make a search listing, you either pay for it or you get there organically.

Organic Search Listings are at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Let’s take Google for example: The results on the left side of the page (under the paid area) often include things like local search listings with Google Maps, video blogs etc.

You can’t pay your way to the top, you have to earn it! Banner ads, sponsored links and pay-per-click advertisements are normally found on the right side of the page in a single column and a few spots at the top of the page. Anyone willing to pay for their ad can be listed here and the more you pay the higher you go. Believe it or not, the hard cost-per-click can

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be as low as a few cents to over $54 per click. On the other hand, organic search results are free and simply require skill and time. With the right strategy, buying clicks provides a great foundation for an effective PPC campaign but takes time and know-how. If you go down this road, you need to also focus your time on the natural search process. In the long run, this is where you can (over time) dominate your market. Organic SEM and PPC is an extremely effective combination for businesses when done the right way, and for those who are able to make the investment of time, research, and money. For all others, organic search SEM is the place to start. Figure A: Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools by clicking on this tab once you have set up your account.

Google Webmaster Tools Rock! Google Webmaster Tools are free tools that allow website owners to see their pages’ visibility on Google, which in turn allows you to use this information to drastically increase your traffic. For instance, Google Webmaster Tools tells you when you are getting 404 errors (i.e. ‘page not found’) and who is linking to your website.

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Google Webmaster Tools is also a good place to make sure that your XML sitemap was properly submitted and that Google has been indexing your pages (this allows people to find them via searches). Make sure the online marketing company you’re hiring has a working knowledge of these tools: you wouldn’t let a mechanic try to fix your car with a bobby pin, would you? Follow this simple six step process to get your webmaster toolbox in working order. Step 1: Set up an account. (If you don’t already have a Google account, get one!) Step 2: Add your site. (See Figure A) Step 3: Confirm your site. To verify your site, Google will ask you to upload an HTML file to your website or add a short snippet of code to your homepage. (Once Google has verified your site, you’ll see a green check mark.) Step 4: Create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap tells Google what pages are on your site so it can index them for searches. The web is like a reference book: Once you’re indexed, you’re officially a topic worth looking up as well as relatively easy to find.

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Figure B: Tell Google Webmaster Tools where to find your sitemap.

However, don’t be alarmed if Google doesn’t index all your pages — it’s ornery that way sometimes. There are a couple ways of going about this depending on what type of site or blog you have. If you’re using WordPress, just install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which will make it automatically for you. If that doesn’t apply to you, simply use a different generator to produce one that works for you. Step 5: Once you’ve got your sitemap, add it to Webmaster Tools and tell it where it lives on your website. Generally, the location will be something like http:// www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. (See Figure B) Step 6: Make sure to habitually check-in to Google Webmaster Tools at least a couple of times per week to look at your statistics and check for errors. What’s the point of having a toolbox if the tools are not in ship-shape? It’s also a good thing to check after you make any changes to your site to make sure that you didn’t break anything in the process.

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To learn more, watch a simple introduction to Google Webmaster Tools on YouTube covering some of these steps and more.

The Keys to Researching and Defining Your Keywords This is an enormous topic that could fill a weekend workshop, but for the purposes of this e-book, I’ll share a short and simple overview of the strategies behind choosing your core keywords that every great online marketing company should employ. Be sure to include core organic search words or phrases in your pages so that people searching for those words/phrases will find you. In order to receive considerable traffic for your website, you need to do two main things: • Make your pages’ content relevant to your keywords • Get inbound links to your pages; however, it appears as though Google no longer favors the method of ‘link anchor text matching’ so be careful.

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Choosing the right words to start with As you can see from the actual Google Keyword Analysis page (see Figure C), there are two pieces of data on a given keyword or set of keywords that you need to know: One is called Advertiser Competition, the other is called Approximate Search Volume: Monthly. Now here’s the trick. At first glance you might be thinking, “Cool, I’ll just put the most searched words throughout my web site and I’m all set!” — WRONG!

Figure C: Advertiser Competition (1) and Approximate Search Volume: Monthly (2) are the key columns to focus on.

The way this digital-ocean-alternativeuniverse works is that you must balance the number of searches with the competitiveness of the words themselves. If you’re just getting into the keyword game, you need to be using the keywords that carry with them a competitive analysis that is less than 20%. You may be new to this, but nobody has to know that. To avoid exposing your weakness in this area, we highly suggest you leave this one up to the online marketing professionals. Online marketing experts will never make amateur mistakes such as choosing the highest traffic keywords possible: heck,

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everyone and their mother is vying for the first few spots on any highly competitive web search. Instead, choose keywords that are well-balanced or moderate in traffic but are highly relevant in terms of what the searcher is looking for vs. what you are offering. This way, the competition is significantly decreased.

Design Your Blog for Targeted Search When you or your marketing expert sets up your main blog categories for your on-site blog, keep the keywords and phrases you chose beforehand in mind. You want to create content that’s focused on your main keywords and categories so that it can eventually grow into a network of content hubs focusing specifically on those subjects. Most blogs are just humdrum listings of the most recent posts. You don’t want to be humdrum or typical; you want to be exceptional — atypical. What you really need to do is add extra ongoing content that makes your blog feel like its own site and has lots of tasty keywords for search engines. Consider adding the following to your blog:

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• An introduction covering the main points of your blog • Links to your blog’s best posts • Links to useful and related content elsewhere

Using Flat Architecture

SEOmoz helps you organize all of your keywords while keeping track of how they are ranking in the search engines. Not only does it keep track of your keywords, but it also crawls your website and gives you reports of what you’re doing wrong. Here’s the best part: it actually tells you how to fix it!

Building pages for hub categories is great for information architecture (IA), link building, and overall user experience. However, be sure to orient most of your sections horizontally rather than all through links. Basically, try to have the majority of your content spread more flatly than deeply.

Track Your SEO Progress Using SEOmoz Campaigns FYI, SEO (I’m having fun with the acronyms here) stands for Search Engine Optimization, and SEOmoz is a company that specializes in just that. SEOmoz, unlike a lot of the Google tools I’ve told you about, does in fact cost money but in this case they’re worth every penny. In order to utilize SEOmoz campaigns, your online marketing company must be a Pro Member of SEOmoz.

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Lead Generation

Landing Pages grasp your customers’ attention and remind them of what they should be doing.

Using Landing Pages as Advertising Adhesive In online marketing, a landing page (also known as a lead capture page) is a singular web page that shows up in response to clicking on a pay-per-click ad or other advertisement. The landing page will ALWAYS take you to direct sales copy that is synergistic to the advertisement or link that got you there in the first place. Landing pages are usually linked to from email campaigns, social media, or search engine marketing campaigns that enhance the effectiveness of the ad itself. The primary goal of a landing page is to assist in email list building and to convert site visitors into sales, or equally important, leads. By analyzing all of the activity generated from

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the ad, your business can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. You need to master click-through rates and conversion rates to assess the success of any online advertisement you use. Landing pages are in the center of several sales and advertising pipelines. Landing pages grasp your customers’ attention and remind them of what they should be doing. When you use landing pages, they can carry with them huge benefits in your return on investment efficiencies. Here are some key points in planning a landing page: • Adopt a disconnected landing page for every incoming traffic supply. • Separate your traffic in between a variation of pages to see which performs best. TEST AND TRACK, TEST AND TRACK!

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• Make sure your landing page declaration is the same as your actual ad. • You must establish a NEED for your solution to develop the DEMAND for it. • Videos are a great attention grabber. Use them to engage new customers and for SEO purposes. • Use directional cues to direct the visitor to your service or offer. • Create harmony between the information you offer and the conversion ratio you actually get. • Develop a way to make distribution simple. Groupon has a very well designed landing page. It includes directional cues and almost zero distractions making sure each visitor gets through the process flawlessly.

• Influence public evidence and assured tools. • Consider the aspect of distractions in your landing page layout — If you can’t focus on one point at a time and get lost in your own layout, the potential customer will get lost too. • Be completely truthful concerning your blogging and critique. Change things aggressively when they’re not working. • Update your advertising on a regular basis.

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(CRO) Conversion Rate Optimization Imagine a racetrack with several horses racing furiously. They run towards you, trying to reach you as fast as they can — picture this as your Inbound traffic. Now, let’s say you don’t have a distinct finish line (i.e. a call to action) or anything else that they want or need once they reach you; they will race right past you! CRO makes sure that those horses are led straight into Optimized-land. (It’s a wonderful place where it’s very clear what needs to be done; every horse is a winner here.)

Grasping Analytics At first, I’ll admit, analytics can be quite dull; but once you get the hang of it and unlock all of its true potential, you will learn to love it. Analytics equals big money when it comes to online marketing. You must learn and master the art of Analytics: by doing so they make your job much easier, make you more informed, and give you the ability to do great stuff like CRO as we talked about above.

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Content is King, I mean... We’ve all heard the saying that “content is king,” but that’s so ten minutes ago in online marketing. Today, content is more like the Holy-Grail-To-All-Things-You-Want-To-HaveHappen. Content is not only for your website, but for everything and every place you look [online]. It absolutely must keep your attention based around your search and then send you off having learned something. Content is everywhere. I bet you by the end of this e-book, you will be writing compelling content yourself!

(PPC) Pay-Per-Click Advertising Like everything else online, pay-per-click campaigns have their highs and lows. A major plus is that they are the fastest way to get traffic to your website; however, it’s way harder than it looks. We’re going to cover a few tips on tackling the right way to run a PPC campaign and also a go-to plan on how to let the pros handle it if you hit an impassible road block.

Create Conversion Goals & Funnels for Your Site

Send Traffic to Landing Pages Instead of Your Homepage

Conversion goals are the actions you want site visitors to take: You might want site visitors to sign up for an account with you, download files, or subscribe to a newsletter. All of these are examples of conversion goals. Your online marketing company should help you establish these conversion goals based on your marketing strategies.

The number one lesson when running a paid search campaign is that you need to send PPC traffic to landing pages – NOT your homepage! Wrongly so, 80% of people still send their PPC traffic to their homepage, but that’s a ridiculous waste of money that won’t make you or your customer happy. Make sure your online marketing company places you within the elite 20% that uses landing pages to their advantage. Does your prospective online marketing company have their own landing pages for their different advertising sources such as Facebook or Twitter that were separate from their homepage? If they do, it’s a good sign that they’re in the game at the expert level you need.

After you’ve established your conversion goals, take a good look at your website and make a list of all the site visitor actions you would like to track. Then, add those goals to your Google Analytics account. If the actions or conversion goals you chose include a sequence of steps, you’ll need to set up something called a funnel. Once you’ve got your conversion goals and funnels set up, it’s a good idea to add them to your dashboard so that they’re easily accessible. (We will discuss this in further detail later on.)

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What’s so bad about sending PPC traffic to my homepage anyway? What’s bad about it is that your homepage is NOT designed for one specific product or service, but for all of your products and services. Thus, if a customer clicks on an ad for a suede couch and they are sent to your furniture store homepage, they WILL leave

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Design your Facebook ‘Like’ page to convince people that they should follow you and make it very clear how to go about liking you.

the site after getting frustrated searching for the couches you were advertising because you are not presenting them what your ad promised to represent. Worse yet, they may get distracted by the Way-Cool-CheapLamp that is on sale and forget all about the more expensive couch that has been crowding your warehouse.

Make Your Facebook ‘Like’ Page Conversion-Oriented The first step to claiming your brand on Facebook is creating your ‘Like’ page (formerly known as a fan page). The purpose of your Like page is simply to get people to ‘Like’ you (i.e. become a fan of your business). In order to accomplish this, you need to do two things: • Design your Facebook ‘Like’ page to convince people that they should follow you and make it very clear how to go about liking you • Encourage or link non-fans to your Facebook ‘Like’ page as they arrive

Designing Your Facebook ‘like’ Page The easiest thing to do is to just design a single image that is 520 pixels wide to fit the Facebook dimensions. Eventually, you can switch to something fancier and more interactive, but in the beginning it’s easier to use an image. Here are some ideas on how to motivate Facebook users to ‘Like’ you: • If you ‘Like’ us, we’ll enter you in our contests. • If you ‘Like’ us, you’ll get to see our special blog. • If you ‘Like’ us, we’ll give you your first yogurt on us! • If you ‘Like’ us, we can feature you in our blog for extra exposure.

Getting a Vanity URL for Your Fan Page In order to make your Facebook page as professional as possible, you’ll want it to have a nicely branded URL AKA vanity URL. An example of a vanity URL:

http://www.facebook.com/pepsi

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In order to get a vanity URL, you’ll need at least 25 fans. Then, visit http://www. facebook.com/yourusername/ to customize your URL.

Conversion depends solely on reducing barriers and friction that reduce entry, and every improvement you make increases the likelihood of conversion.

Learn From Your Users Using Live Chat and Feedback Widgets

Segment Your Inbound Traffic Sources

There are multiple ways to input ideas and theories into optimization efforts: experience, analytics, expert advice, and of course a few pinches of opinion for good measure. But what’s missing? User feedback.

Most marketers have several sources of inbound traffic, which is great! However, if you send all of your PPC, banner, social media, email, and organic search traffic to the same place it can create some issues:

Getting User Feedback at the Point of Conversion Instead of speculating why people aren’t converting, why not just ask them? To do just that, all you have to do is just embed a few simple feedback widgets on your page. There are two main types of feedback widgets: survey tools that pop up from the screen’s bottom corner with questions, or a live chat-like instant messenger that lets you talk to your actual non-converted potential customers.

• Hard to Measure: With all that inbound traffic coming into one place, you’ll need some pretty fancy analytics to figure what source the traffic is coming from. • Hard to Test: Since all your traffic is going to the same place, you can’t alter your page for one traffic source without affecting the rest of your traffic.

The point of segmenting your inbound traffic is not only to help avoid these issues, but to decide which channels do and don’t work and how much of your budget should be devoted to each source.

Try using live chat programs to assist in conversions.

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Page Quality Optimization

Excessive links, products, and services on one page will only confuse your visitors.

Creating a Purpose and Call to Action for the landing Page The most important component of a landing page is the objective. Landing pages should have a clear focus on a single objective to help visitors realize your intended goal and keep your conversion activities on track. I cannot say this enough — If you are trying to sell multiple products or services on one page or if there are a large number of links, then your hard-earned visitors will stray from your goal. Not only will they stray from your goal, but they probably won’t be able to find what they’re looking for to start with. To achieve the maximum conversion rate of your online traffic, you need landing pages that are dedicated to exactly one story, promotion, offer, or product with one goal

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and one call to action. Landing pages with multiple goals, traffic sources, and users in mind are far less efficient than the focused, more specified landing pages.

Are you doing it right? Take a look at your web site and determine where you’re sending people interested in your advertising. Most likely, you’re part of the 80% of people sending them to their homepage. If that’s you, count how many links and interaction points you have and think about how you could reduce them using a landing page. If you already have a landing page, then you’re doing better than most and are one step ahead of the game. Read your landing page’s content aloud and ask yourself:

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? ? ?

Is it purposeful?

Is it specific to your topic?

Is it focused?

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• Is it purposeful? • Is it specific to your topic? • Is it focused?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all of the above, give yourself a pat on the back! To sum it all up once more: Your customers can’t handle more than one message at a time. Remember the old acronym KISS? (Keep It Super Simple!)

Reveal Your Site’s Weaknesses Quickly assess your site to see which areas are working and which areas are not. Look back on your goals/funnels and keep a look out for these red flags: • High bounce rates on key landing pages • Sub-par rates on conversion goals • Exit points within sales funnels

Your goal for this assessment is to use your analytics software to give you insight into your weakest links. Once you have identified your site’s weaknesses, establish new priorities for optimization.

Google’s top Bounce Rate Executive Avinash Kaushik says it best, “They come to your site, they puke, they leave.”

What’s a bounce? A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website and then leaves without visiting any other pages before a specified session timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. Bounce Rate = (Total # of Visitors Viewing A Single Page / Total Entries to Page)

A visitor may bounce by: • Clicking on a link on your page leading to a different web site • Closing an open window or tab • Typing a new URL • Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site • Session timeout

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Make a separate Landing Page for Each Ad Group Making individual landing pages for each ad group is a great way to compare the effectiveness of your different ads. An ad group is a group of ads that all target the same keywords. If you drive inbound visitors from all ad groups to the same page, then you will not meet your goal of having a precise message. As a result, your quality score, cost-per-click, and conversion rate will suffer. By using a different landing page for each ad group, you can tailor the experience and message for each ad group individually. Don’t send mixed messages!

A/B Test Your Landing Pages There’s nothing better than a good old-fashioned boardroom showdown about your ad’s direction or layout. Usually the only direction you want to go is out. An easy solution for such showdowns is an actual showdown through A/B Testing.

Every time you learn more from your users, construct a new page and do another A/B test.

see which are the most productive. Below are tools you can use to do A/B testing: • Google Website Optimizer (GWO): Requires that you are somewhat tech-savvy to set up scripts throughout your pages, but it’s free. • Visual Website Optimizer (VWO): A visual alternative to GWO, has some advanced features like heat maps and click maps. • Optimizely: Similar to VWO by allowing you make your testing changes in a visual environment. • Unbounce: This one does two things for you: It creates and tests new landing pages.

As the diagram shows, you can use your user feedback to create a new version of your landing page to A/B test. Every time you learn more from your users, construct a new landing page and do another A/B test. Keep innovating because as soon as you’ve got it just right, times will change and you’ll be at the starting line once again.

A/B Testing lets you remove the “I think” from these discussions and replace it with a much more reputable, “Testing shows.” It lets you pit different pages against one another to

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The Five Second Test Another way to do audit your landing pages is by running the Five Second Test (fivesecondtest.com). The theory at play here is that most people only spend about five seconds on a site before they decide to stay or go. Basically, you need to do a sales pitch in less than five seconds that will go in one ear, and hopefully not come out the other As with all experimental tests, you’ll need a guinea pig, ideally someone from your target audience who hasn’t been approached or exposed to your brand before. Sit them down in front of the computer and put your page up on the screen for approximately 5-10 seconds. Then, ask them what your page was about. If they don’t know or have only a faint idea, your page needs to be simplified.

Hint, hint! Fivesecondtest.com lets you run the Five Second Test online by testing your website on their user base. Fivesecondtest.com provides you with an entire community of testers that you can test your website on.

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Content Advertising

I think it’s safe to say that if you are going to be marketing, you need something to market.

Say What You Mean AND Mean What You Say The main source of content you will be sharing with the world is your blog. Make sure that it’s on your website and not out there swimming in the digital ocean all on its own. There are three separate categories of conversation; choosing which route to go will determine how much of an expert you want to be on a topic. It can also affect how much traffic you generate to your stream. (This is something you would want to discuss very thoroughly with your marketing company.) Let’s discuss the three different categories of conversation styles, shall we?

Creators You want to be known as sharp and cutting

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edge. Creators are the people who develop and commission out the original content.

Curators This simply involves tapping into some helpful RSS feeds (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication). RSS feeds are a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works — such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video — in a standardized format. One of the best ways to acquire RSS feeds is to sign up for websites like UberVu.com or Google Reader. You’ll find both to be a great place to find outstanding content pertaining to your topic. From there you just add some intuitive commentary on your piece as you share it with others.

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Conversationalists These are the people who just talk to talk. I think it’s a little overrated. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think reading constant posts about what your goldfish thinks about global warming is great for business unless you happen to be a goldfish.

Start sharing your content on Google Reader as a creator. As a curator, search for interesting content that you can comment on.

Now don’t get me wrong, these types of bloggers are still necessary because you need to give your business color by adding some personal details, just attach your brain before you start blabbing away. Always remember that what you write in the digital world can stay there for a lifetime.

Start Bookmarking Content on Delicious Delicious is a social bookmarking website that acts like the bookmarks on your web browser, but bigger. The world wide web is a huge place full of knowledge, but the problem is sorting through it all to try to find

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the good stuff. Delicious solves this problem by allowing users to save their bookmarks, share them with others, and see what other people are bookmarking. Many PR marketers and bloggers are using Delicious as a valuable resource and you should too. Make a habit of submitting all of your content to Delicious and tagging it with applicable keywords so that people searching for those topics can find you. The same principle of link anchor text matching applies here too: the more people who have acknowledged your content, the more credibility you have. Since the number of bookmarks you have on your content is publicly displayed, it is imperative that you get more so that you can continue being a credible source.

Give Away Knowledge Freebies Wait, you didn’t just say the forbidden word, did you? FREE-bies? Yes, freebies! I think it’s safe to say that if you are going to be marketing, you need something to market. This couldn’t be truer than when it comes to content.

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Create a Corporate Blog It’s never too early to start blogging about your fresh ideas. Don’t wait until you have an official product or service; blogging about future products keeps people interested and it is a great source for early advertising. Apples’ iPhone was talked about for over a year before it was released! (Maybe you’ve heard of it?)

Enable Others to Share Your Content

WordPress blogs are a great way to start teasing your finished product, it’s never too early to start getting connected to your audience.

Some of the best social media marketing you’ll ever get will be from people that aren’t even on your payroll. If you want to get some of this pro bono advertising, then you need to add simple sharing tools to all of your content. If you’re using WordPress, or other similar blogging software, there are hundreds of plug-ins available allowing readers to share and vote for your content on social hubs. Don’t limit these wonderful people to marketing your company only within the blogosphere; expand their influence to Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious by using the sharing widgets readily available to you. These sharing widgets help you with two main things:

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• They make it extremely easy to share your content. • They show you how many people have shared your content, which proves to visitors that your post — unlike many others — is actually worth reading. (Negative social proof is just as bad as positive social proof is good.) Chances are that if nobody backlinks to your blog posts or retweets (RT) your Twitter activity, you content is failing to pique the interest of your target market.

Write an e-book In order to generate consumer interest or inquiry in your product/service, you need to give them a sample. One of the best ways to do this is through an e-book. E-books (typically in a PDF format) contain condensed information about a subject that your potential customers would find useful. The length of your e-book and the depth to which go into detail is entirely up to you. (We went a little on the long side with this one!) When you’re just starting out, writing an e-book is a great way to obtain interest, gain traffic, and establish a reputation as an expert.

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Let People Know that it’s Okay to Share... In Fact, Encourage It! “Old-school” marketers used to be highly reluctant to giving anything away for free. Heck, even mentioning the word “Free” in business was the equivalent of saying the F-word in elementary school. Nowadays, all of this has changed — that’s outdated thinking. You want as many people as possible to share your e-book in order to get the message out into the world. Make it crystal clear in your PDF that people should share it with their colleagues. In fact, don’t hesitate to put that in a note in the footer on every page. You can test your blogging skills on the YOUmoz blog and users will decide if your content is good enough for the main SEOmoz blog by voting thumbs up or down.

Get rid of the ‘catch’! Sometimes, especially when you’re just trying to spread the word, it’s better not to place any barriers between people and your content. Not asking for emails in exchange for viewing content may prevent you from being able to contact interested people, but the download increase and exposure you get are often worth it. People appreciate it when there’s no ‘catch’ because it makes your company seem more genuine and trustworthy. Plus, companies constantly

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asking for people’s contact information can get annoying; and you’re only giving yourself positive PR by not blending in with the crowd. However, there’s nothing wrong with experimenting. Try asking for emails sometimes, then try it by removing the ‘catch’ and evaluate results. (The science between finding a good balance here can really be difficult unless you know exactly what to look for. We recommend hiring an online marketing firm to handle this — and everything else we’ve covered in this e-book thus far.)

Write Guest Posts for Other Blogs Writing guest posts means submitting content to another company to be published on their blog. It’s a great action to take for content marketing because: • It establishes you as another thought leader on blogs/sites frequented by people in your target audience • It stretches your reach • It gives you valuable inbound links • It increases your inbound traffic

Before you start guest posting, you need to establish yourself as an accomplished writer

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of the English language because people don’t want you using their blog unless you’re good, really good. Focus on your own blog first: If you’ve worked on your own blog extensively and already feel that you have what it takes to guest post, do a test drive on the YOUmoz blog. It’s a great way to test your skills because the community decides if your content is good enough to be put on the main SEOmoz blog by voting. If your test drive goes well, then start guest posting. As you successfully guest post more often, you’ll gain access to the more high-profile blogs.

Guest Posting Tips If you want to be a successful guest poster, there are only two things that you have to do to get started: • Write only your very best content. • Stick around after your blog posts to chat with the community. Answering your readers’ questions show that you actually care about what you’re saying and what people think, not just about the exposure.

Don’t Use Graphic Headers for Your Landing Pages Graphic headers may be pretty, but ad bots can’t read them (except for the “alt” text). Plus, they’re harder to quickly change copy on-the-fly. Assuming that you’re already sending each ad group to a different landing page, the next step is to make your ad and landing page messages match as much as possible to earn a higher quality score. The easiest way to increase your quality score is to make the content and headline of your landing page as similar as possible to the phrases you’ve used in the corresponding ad group.

Quality score: scores given to each keyword based on how relevant it is to the text and searchers’ queries; the quality score affects a keywords’ costper-click and ad ranking.

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Link building Link building is like eating green vegetables: It’s one of those things that is good for you but may not be very exciting unless you put tons of butter on it. However, you’ve got to do some link building if you want a healthy online marketing campaign. (You can hire us to do your link building, we don’t mind eating green veggies!) You need people to link to your website with strong keywords related to your content. One of the top reasons content marketing is so important is because there is a bigger chance of people linking to your content than your brand name. Being ranked number one for your brand name is oh-soimportant, but it’s usually easily done. There are three things to remember when link building: • Write awesome/useful/inspiring/funny content that people will want to link to • Find out who links to you, then optimize those links • Quality links are the key here (While quantity is good, quality is better.)

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Locate and Optimize Links Identify Inbound Links: Set up Google Alerts on your brand name, website URL, and business-related topics. Google Alerts will alert you when people are conversing or mentioning your name on the web. Knowing about these mentions and conversations will allow you to jump in and keep the conversation going. Not only is that great marketing, but it also helps you build relationships with the people who own the blogs or content you’re interacting with. In addition to using Google Alerts, you can discover inbound links by checking Web Master Tools. However, the most reliable place to find inbound links is Yahoo Site Explorer. Google Alerts will alert you when people are conversing or mentioning your name on the web.

Optimize Inbound Links: Schedule a monthly check of all the sites with inbound links to you. (Those sites can be found using Google Alerts too.) Contact the author of each link, such as a blog writer, and politely ask them to change the link’s anchor text to something that will help your organic search results. This is a far more legitimate way of doing this than the old-school link exchange requests that are always spamming people.

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Honorable Mentioning Your Way to Relationships By writing about others (and giving them a nicely optimized link), you can get yourself on their radar and attract goodwill as well; Think of it as blog-karma; do nice things for other people and nice things will come back to you. There are four main ways people can find out that you wrote about them: • If you link to a blog post of theirs (They’ll be notified of your link by their blogging software) • If they have Google Alerts (They will see their brand being mentioned and can trace it back to your article) • If you linked to the post via social media (e.g. Twitter, including their name will make them notice) • If you email them directly

Bottom line: Blog-karma will cometh if you take action!

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Another Benefit of Writing about Others If you are writing positive and interesting content about a company, they might pass along the good PR by sharing it with their network. This will help you out immensely by extending your reach to a new network of fresh and potential customers.

Remember! — Always have a call to action at the end of your post to maximize this traffic when you get it. Infographics are often presented as statistics but they can technically be any self-contained unit of visual information.

Create an Infographic An infographic is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — a graphical display of information. They are often presented as statistics but they can technically be any self-contained unit of visual information.

How to Encourage Sharing and Bring In Traffic from Your Infographics • Use social sharing buttons (i.e. retweet or a like button) on the page with the infographic • Provide an embed code, and encourage people to take it and put it on their own site

Designing an Infographic The actual designing part is often the hardest part because of its time-consuming and tedious nature. Once you have a design in mind, pass your final written copy as well as your layout ideas to your graphic designer. Designing the final version of your infographic isn’t your job; your online marketing company should have designers onboard and ready to rock!

Infographics are very popular and are easily shared. People often bookmark them for reference (remember Delicious.com?), and they sometimes even write about them and collect them into parcel posts, which make them perfect “link bait.”

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A Few Final Thoughts

We trust this e-book has helped you better understand the world of online marketing tactics immensely.

The final Take The primary reason for writing this e-book was my motivation to help prevent hard-working business owners from making simple mistakes with their online marketing. Every single day we see companies whose entire online presence is a complete disaster because of poorly executed online marketing strategies. (If you uncover any online marketing disasters, help them out and feel free to send out a copy of this e-book!) The truth of the matter is that “online marketing experts” are coming out of the woodwork these days. The reality is that very few have gone through the years of skill building it takes to run a successful online marketing campaign for your business.

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In today’s economy choosing the right online marketing company is imperative for your business; stick with the professionals. If you think we overstate that, just try to get back onto Google after you’ve been banned because of something your genius nephew did after he told you he could do to get you onto page number one! Whether you use our services or not, we trust this e-book has helped you better understand the world of online marketing tactics immensely.

Yes! You’ve finally gotten through this long guide on what it takes to be a social media marketing master, but this is just the beginning.

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NOTE: The aforementioned tasks can seem a bit overwhelming to the typical businessman. Most MSEs (small to medium size businesses earning 2.5 to 50 million annually) have enough to worry about it. They simply don’t have the time to master the art of either social media marketing or online marketing, let alone implement it by themselves. That’s where we come in.

About our team BizChangerZ’ founder Michael Besson has over 22 years of experience in tactical business development. To top that off, the rest of the leadership team at BizChangerZ has equally matched experience in distinctively different areas of business development all using unique strategies!

WRITTEN BY:

MICHAEL P. BESSON

MARKETING GENERAL