Marketing on Internet Road 

There is no better strategy to achieve better reach, expanded coverage and enhanced brand awareness than social media marketing. Social media is by far the number one tool for engagement and interaction with your target audience. Now is the time to adapt to the already-changed online landscape and market your offerings through social networks, if you haven’t already started.

Social media allows any business to connect with people, reach potential customers faster than ever and strengthen relationships with existing customers and prospects.

Interested in learning how to leverage social networking for your own business?

The first action to take is to register on a social network and to create an account or a profile (depends on the network). Online networks are specifically designed to connect with others, so make the most out of this possibility.

Get on Facebook and set up a page for your company (important: not a personal profile!). Consider also setting up a group for your company. In case you have a specific niche you want to reach, set up a LinkedIn and/or Facebook group and invite current clients and other contacts to join. Make sure to publish regular (but valuable) content to that group.

Communities which are formed on the basis of shared ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ are great “entry points” into potential customers’ mind. This also helps in adding a human element to your product offering. Social networking sites enable you to get in touch with people who may be interested in your product or service, so make sure to take advantage of that.

To build your online brand reputation, which is becoming one of the most important factors online, focus your efforts on getting people to follow and endorse you through the various social networks..

To support all of your efforts, make sure to have a blog for your business. Blogging gives greater exposure to your business expertise and knowledge and could be information that people will value hence will engage with and share. You benefit as social media users gain awareness about your business and offerings and “syndicate” your words to other people they are connected with.

To help you engage with the online business community, here are some key social media best practices:

• Welcome Participation and Feedback - Let people talk to you. Developing relationships and communities within the social networks online can facilitate buy in, provide amazing feedback and business opportunities.
• Advise, Don’t Sell - Listen in to what is being said and offer expert advice. The simple rule here is the more you have to give, the more you get back. People who use social networking sites are sensitive by nature to sales pitches. So be the expert first, build trust, and then leverage your position to subtly 'recommend' your products or services.
• Be Visible and Credible - Establish yourself as an expert through regular blogging, tweeting and interacting on forums within your area of expertise.
• Listen and Respond - Don't participate in random conversations. Listen in on social networks, try to find out what is the online buzz, what your prospects need or are interested in. Then offer your opinion and custom solutions.

Use social networking to work your way into the hearts of potential as well as existing customers. Respect the tone and culture of the sites that you join and avoid being pushy. Share your knowledge and expertise, and very fast social networking will give you a good boost as you market your products or services online.

In the beginning of 2011 Google had introduced a major and substantial update to it search algorithm, known as the “Panda Update”. The update that started in North America in February was rolled out to all international English websites in April and is gradually rolled out to all languages globally.

What Does Google Really Want

The Effects of the Panda Update

What Google Signals with the Panda Update

What to do to succeed in the post-panda era?

Internet marketing strategies face a constant need to keep up with the recent changes that take place. Unless you are keeping a finger on the pulse regularly, you are facing the risk of carrying out redundant tasks and setting your focus on irrelevant tactics.

Although there are so many ingredients in this stew, we have collected several hot topics that we consider as Internet Marketing “do or die” as of today and listed them below (not in any order of importance).

Each topic below can be (and actually is) a topic for an article or an e-book. However, in order not to turn this post into one, we didn’t include anything related to each of the topics. Rather, the intention is to shed some light per topic to explain the main parameter and why this topic is important.

Segment your data

In the spirit of giving context to any analysis you are doing on your data (e.g.: your Google Analytics data), slicing and dicing your data across (your) various dimensions is a must.

Make sure to be aware of the risk of analyzing the average and referring to total figures and “typical” visits or visitors. Everything must have a context and the key for achieving context and ability to drive conclusions (and as a result of that improve the various marketing efforts) is with segmentation.

Some examples:

• Your online presence spans today over multiple places (and if not it should; see also down the list) and your traffic arrives from different sources.
• New visitors behave differently compared to returning ones. Getting back to the context issue – this depends a lot on your business.
• Visitors from different geographic places might or may behave differently.

If you wish to draw the right conclusions and improve your efforts, you must first know what should be corrected and/or what should get even higher investment. The only way to do that is with proper segmentation.

So, take a close look at all your traffic sources, your target market’s demographics and any other important aspect of your digital touch-points (yes, it’s not only your website) and segment your data accordingly. Never expect the same behavior from different segments, and even if you do – the only way to measure it is by segmenting.

Conclusion: prepare a list of critical segmented reports on your data and then add some whenever you see the need to dive in furthermore.

SEO your site(s)

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a highly dynamic terrain and no one holds the secret to what it means, it is still the basics to anything else.

No matter what is “known” as the key factors for ranking well on search engines, there are fundamental things that should be dealt with in any case:

• Make sure your website is “spiderable” by search engines
• Make sure your website contains unique content (that is, no duplicate content on different pages of the site and no copied from elsewhere on the internet)
• Make sure that each page is optimized for one key-phrase where all the copy of this page is about this one key-phrase
• Make sure each and every page has its own unique title and description, and that they support the key-phrase each page is optimized for.

Add to that the bonuses you will get from Google and the other search engines for having a lot of content (arguably – 100 indexed pages and more) and fresh content, and you have the foundations set properly for anything else.

It’s worthwhile to indicate that in the last year or so, SEO can and should be done not only to your website but also to other places online where you have presence in (e.g.: YouTube, Facebook). It’s not the same as SEO for your website and there are different details for each. There are enough details for a separate post on each of them (will take on the challenge:-)).

Tip: register your site on the webmaster tools of any of the major search engines (Google’s one is https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools) to make sure your site is being crawled quickly and on a regular basis as well as to get indication on problems on your site that will hurt your SEO efforts.

Conclusion: take a close look at your website and make sure all the fundamentals are in place and aligned with the best practices of SEO.

Build Good and Long list of Links

We have already established the importance of SEO and the need to ensure that all the basic on-site elements are in order. The second most important aspect of SEO nowadays is related to link building.

What you need to be concern of from SEO perspective is your authority. That is, the authority of your website and your web pages. What used to be measured by Google’s Page Rank in the past is now being measured mostly by the links that are pointing to your pages.

From the perspective of links size does matter, so you need to make sure more and more websites are pointing at your content. But it’s not only the count, the type of sites that are linking to you is also important: The more authoritative sites sending links at your direction, the better.

The fact that we are referring to “pages” and not (only) “website” has a reason: the search engines index your web pages and not your website. Your website is a collection of your pages and although your website’s authoritative score is important, if you wish to rank with specific pages (and you do), you must ensure there are links pointing to each of those pages directly and not only to the home page of your site.

Another important point is the “anchor text”. There is a huge difference if a link to your page reads “read more” compared to a text that explains what the page is about. The best is to use variations of the main key-phrase the page is optimized for and not just general wordings or your company’s name.

Tip: although not the most important, internal links on your website also play a factor. Make sure to point at your more important pages from multiple pages on your own site and always use absolute URL (http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html and not /pagename.html).

The top three ways to have links are:

• Submitting your pages to directories
• Ask other websites that are related to your industry and market to hold a link to your web pages
• Submit your web pages to various social bookmarks networks (e.g.: reddit.com, stumbleupon.com and alike). You can do this yourself, use a “pinging service” to help you with that, or outsource this service to one of the so many service providers that exist online.

Small word of warning: link building needs to be done on a constant basis and with no too big of peaks. That is, don’t aim at getting in one month 1000 links to your website. This will always look artificial and suspicious to the search engines and will be ignored.

Conclusion: place the amount and type of links pointing at your pages in the top list of important factors to measure, optimize your internal links on your websites to point properly to your most important pages and create a steady stream of links with proper variations of those key-phrases you are optimizing your pages for.

Have an active Blog

As a result of the abovementioned SEO and link building topics, having an active blog is really a must:
For one, having a blog will help you build your authority in your market. You are producing interesting information of topics related to your industry. The more often you do that with unique and interesting content, the more your target audience will know you as an authority in your field. Not bad for brand awareness as well.

This authority will project on your website overall authority since you will get more links for your interesting posts and more visits to your domain.

Regular posting to a blog will gradually make your website bigger and with fresh content. We already established that the search engines love those 2 factors, so you are holding a great opportunity to have so many great outcomes, simply by writing on what you do and what your know.

Your blog is also a great tool to create more internal links to your important pages. Simply make sure to think about key phrase optimization when writing posts and set a couple of links from any post you are writing to your website’s pages.

Tip: there is a general wonder how the blog should be set up from SEO perspective. Should it be yoursite.com/blog, blog.yoursite.com or a different domain all together? The online community is getting lately to the conclusion that the first option is actually the best. Nevertheless, if it’s not possible, the goal is still to have a blog, so don’t just give it up because of one or another reason.

Conclusion: create a blogging agenda and start writing one post per week. After about 2 months, Increase it to 2 per week at least.

Get (seriously) involved with Social technology

Coming from the (great) book of Scot Klososky called “Enterprise Social Technology”, Social Technology includes the following 3 elements:

• Social relevance (reputation management mainly)
• Social Media
• Social networking

All three are important and we are using them or being affected by in our day to day as users, but they are also very important for our business and online marketing.

Setting the focus on Social Media and Social networking, they contain great opportunities to promote your business today. We won’t be getting into too much details as for this topic you can really find a ton of resources (and Klososky’s book is a great example), but we will indicate that active participation in the social realm will enable you to connect with your potential customers and existing customers in levels that were the dreams of business owners since as long as businesses exist.

Coming back to the points made on SEO, link building and authority, Social Technology is the one place to be to get great values for those factors!

Conclusion: Set up your Facebook page, LinkedIn company page and personal profile, YouTube channel, Twitter account and more and start generating content on those platforms. Content could be syndicated from your website and blog whenever there is anything new there, as well as created specifically for those social networks.

Set goals to track your website conversion

For a very long time, the Internet Marketing community is debating if Google is using “click data” as one of the factors in its algorithm. Click data means data on how many clicks (and related aspects) a web page is getting.

Google is in a great position to look at this data with their access to their own Google Analytics platform that is dominating the analytics market online. For the sake of this post, we are putting aside the discussion on whether this is right or wrong, ethical or not.

A few months ago, one of Google’s top people hinted that Google is actually using this data, and if Google does, we should think of what it means to all of us.

The idea behind looking at the “click data” is to be able to determine not only which content is better on which pages, but also which pages are actually getting clicks from searchers and even more importantly – which of them end up with conversions! From Google point-of-view, if a web page is being clicked more and is achieving more conversions when people are searching for a certain phrase, it means that this web page is more relevant to this search query and should be promoted to make itself useful for more searchers. Make sense!

Assuming that you are running Google Analytics on your website already (and if not, leave this post now and do it), you must make sure goals are set up on your account and that your site is getting conversion for your top key-phrases. We actually noticed several examples in the last 6 months of web pages of our customers that went up in ranking simply when we set up proper goals and improved the conversion architecture of the web site to get more conversions.

Having said all of that regarding setting and measuring your website’s goals, don’t stop there: SEO, ranking and measurements are all nice things, but what you should really be concerned about are the conversions on your site. After all, this is what really matters. So, when you are tracking your goals, make sure to draw actions and improve your online results.

Conclusion: Set your website’s goals on Google Analytics

On last thing to point out:

Each of the 6 tactics listed above have their own value. But, if you take a closer look at the whole, you can clearly see that values gained from one tactics will promote your efforts on more than one topic.
This is for me one of the beauties of online marketing: the idea of one plus one equals more than the obvious two. How is that for an incentive to roll up those sleeves and get busy with internet marketing?


Questions, comments, remarks, praises and shared thoughts are more than welcomed :-)