Posts Tagged best practices
Leveraging Existing Web Content for Optimizing Your Website
New content is important to a website, however, constantly striving to create new content can become burdensome, and more importantly, distract us from capitalizing upon the content we have that is working well. What do we mean?
With the content you already have published online, our strategy is to maintain awareness of our inventory. Following some basic steps, we’re then able to leverage existing assets in a more targeted fashion, and create more opportunity. Let’s review.
Keep a list of your content and assets by inventorying everything on your website, in your marketing mix, and keep this list handy for ongoing review. Content is not merely your blog post and website pages either, you will also want to list video, ebooks, audio, images, and other items you have published online.
Organize your list of content assets by category. Typically we publish content in categories on our blogs, so keeping your list organized allows you to quickly leverage, edit, republish, and assign to appropriate categories for consistency and increased ranking weight.
Who is the target audience for the content or categories we have published online? By taking some time to decipher who the target audience is (even appears to be from traffic metrics), you gain more useful insight to your content strategy, content use, and target audience which helps with focusing our content new and old.
Monitor your Analytics (web statistics) and know what posts and content has been the most popular. As well, where are most of the visitors (or best visitors) coming from when they reach your website? Knowing this information gives us a more focused and strategic opportunity when leveraging our existing assets and publishing content.
In addition, your statistics and the insights gained provide you with a key opportunity to optimize current web pages and blog posts for keywords and phrases that will strengthen this content for the target market trying to find your website via search.
Here are some methods for leveraging your content and website assets:
- Create an ebook from existing content
- Interview subject or industry experts
- Link new content to older relevant content
- Find places to link-back to your existing content
- Invite guests to write guest posts, and link to existing content
- Focus attention upon your strongest categories to create authority.
All these things strengthen your current assets, help to optimize your website for search engines, and set you apart as an authority.
Happy blogging!
A Blog with RSS Feed is Your Best Social Media Asset
Meeting with a past client over lunch recently, our conversation spent some time discussing what was happening with his new business launch and the website development he had his nephew do on his behalf. Learning that there was no blog at all included in the website delivery, I reacted strongly with disappointment and disbelief.
As a past client, in the Business Coaching side of my vocational life, the best practices for web development, website publishing, and social media marketing were discussed. Sharing the value and importance of the RSS Feed a blog offers, the updated content strategy followed, all offer enormous benefits for online advertising and internet marketing.
Young nephew suggested a blog wasn’t required at this stage. At OMC Social, it is an essential ingredient to the social media marketing strategy and business development goals for online marketing. New fresh content, the ability to share that content, and extend one’s business to an audience has to keep them interested. As a major side-benefit, Google Search loves fresh content, and the better written per Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research practices, the influence upon website ranking is powerful.
So, my soapbox today says to get a blog on your website domain, and use it religiously, faithfully, and in engaging and creative ways to draw your website visitors in to engage you more. Additionally, benefit from the Search Engine benefits, and social media promotions that create more and more influence as you remain faithful to the best practices for online engagement and content development.
You’ll be glad you did. Your domain is your best asset for increasing website visitor traffic. The blog channel is one of the best website tools. Add one now.
Email Marketing: Tips for Improving Your Stats
Tips For Improving Your Stats- Would you believe? Go ahead and be plain, looking a little boring.
- For the subject line of the email, don’t buy into the habit of selling; Tell them what is inside the email.
- Getting past spam filters is integral to effective email marketing. People are avid at filtering out spam, and so are email inbox systems. Avoid using keywords or phrases that are known to be spammy, and never use CAPS. A quick visit to your own Spam folder in your email can educate you enormously.
- Old lists often have many invalid addresses, hard bounces, and indicate a need to implement a control system to keep your email list up-to-date and accurate. There are many people who will change their email accounts every few months.
- Keep in regular contact, at least once per quarter, so you keep your email list as up-to-date as possible. As well, this encourages maintaining the relationship with your email marketing list customers/audience.
- A soft bounce typically indicates an email address is temporarily unavailable. It could be someone on vacation, or a full inbox. Keep these and try them again at a later date.
- A hard bounce is a failed email delivery. Often it is a non-existent email account, or an incorrectly typed email address entered when someone became a subscriber. It’s also possible that it is a spam filter rejecting the email.
- When email recipients receive an email and they click the “This is spam” button it creates an abuse record. This will happen when someone in your audience doesn’t remember you. Ensure you have your From and Subject complete with your company name so they will recognize you.
Email Marketing Tools – Comparison Review
Posted by leedman in Email Marketing on October 29, 2010
Email marketing remains the most effective form of communicating with your audience and converting leads to sales, and those sales into loyal customers. Many business people are aware of this and are willing to tackle the chore of email marketing, and can easily find themselves bogged down with the task of managing their email list and ensuring the follow-up happens.
Automation
For some, automation is a dirty word. For others, they understand that it is the process of knowing what they want to communicate and putting the processes in place to ensure their message gets out consistently and effectively. The personal touch remains, as the opportunity for further follow-up happens as a result of effective automation processes.
An interesting statistic is that it is the 5th point of email contact with a customer that results in 80% of the sales that occur via email marketing, and yet, less than 10% of small business owners will consistently do this follow-up.
Email Marketing Tools – Choices
There are many services available for email marketing, and today three email marketing tools are presented, plus a fourth that is part of a much more comprehensive software service which does considerably more than just email marketing. Read on!
Constant Contact
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Constant Contact has various price points and is an excellent choice for the beginner who is only interested in marketing with a Newsletter Sign-Up. As you grow in confidence and learn more creative approaches, however, you will find this email marketing tool will leave what it offers lacking for implementation on your site.
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The difficulty with this tool is it limits the number of forms and targeted lists that you can set up. During the initial exploration of the service only one Capture Sign-up Form for your website was available. With excellent email marketing, it is important to be able to create additional capture forms for a website that enable segmented sign-up offers that capture leads based upon preferences.
See Aweber below to learn more about other uses of multiple forms.
Aweber is an excellent tool for email marketing, and particularly for bloggers. This email marketing system allows the creation of various lists, and accompanying Sign-Up Lead Capture forms. This permits new forms to be created for Newsletter Sign-up, as well as others for specific offers that may be created on other website pages or blog posts.
With a specific offer posted to a website, when people sign-up, their contact details are being captured in specific and targeted lists that make future follow-up sequences much more effective.
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The pricing plan is competitive and adjusts according to the volume and quantity of email lists and marketing. A particularly popular feature with this tool is that it will auto-email new blog post updates as a newsletter, thus taking more work off the business owners plate when new blog posts are published on the website.
Email Marketing 2.0 sophistication: InfusionSoft offers a superb tool with two price points. The Basic Plan is for a business owner engaged in email marketing for their own personal business reasons. It also allows an additional user account access for support and administration.
InfusionSoft offers plenty of templates and sequences already in the resource library to help business owners to get started with creating and implementing their email marketing campaigns. This helps take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation, as existing campaign sequences can be utilized and customized to fit the business needs.
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The Deluxe package takes things to a whole new level with features for handling ecommerce, affiliate tracking, and collections.
With the basic package, up to 25,000 emails per month can be sent out, and the Deluxe affords 75,000 emails/month.
A special mention is introduced with XLsuite, a hosted solution for a website, particularly suited to anyone wishing to leverage every aspect of Internet Marketing. This is a serious tool-set for the serious marketer, with blogging tools, content management system, ecommerce, affiliate tracking, and email marketing tools and API tie-ins, the business owner has much greater access and flexibility with their marketing.
While the setup and implementation can be more costly for some who require more customization, the long-term savings with all the tools managed from one central login, the business owner will experience greater savings.
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There is much more that can be said about each of these product offers. With each service, there are additional options for add-ons that can enhance your online marketing efforts. More information can be found on their sites. Many of these services will interact publishing to social media accounts and profiles.
3 Email Mistakes That Will Cost You
If you use email as part of your marketing strategy, deliverability is probably among your top concerns. After all, emails need to arrive in the inbox before they can effectively generate leads. Unfortunately, there are a few gaffes that can cost you when you send your next email marketing message. Here of the top three mistakes.
1. Sending to an Old List
We know it’s tough to let go of people on your email list but the consequence of sending to people who haven’t heard from you in over six months is quite severe. If you email 1,000 people and two hit the “Report Spam” button, the odds of your other emails being delivered drops drastically. Yes, it’s that serious! The 0.1% industry guideline is mandated from ISPs and burdened by email service providers.
To overcome this, do NOT email people you have not had recent contact with (we’re talking longer than six months). Email permission typically expires after about nine months and spam complaints go up exponentially after six months. Alternatively, you can use a reconnect campaign via direct mail like a postcard or letter to help “ignite” their permission again. Permission is key.
2. Sending the Wrong Message at the Wrong Time
Over the years, small business users grow comfortable sending to their entire list. This can irritate recipients who don’t want every single announcement from your business. What do these people do when they receive a poorly-targeted/timed message? They unsubscribe and report spam. Tough love, eh? This isn’t the time for list scrubbing – it’s the time for targeted, segmented and truly relevant messages to be delivered to your recipients.
The solution is to narrow your broadcasts to smaller groups in your database. Leverage technology that allows you to segment the interest, needs and previous activity of your subscribers so you only send to the ones who expect your email and are interested in getting specific and targeted information from you.
3. Infrequent, Inconsistent Contact
Similar to above, sending infrequent, unexpected emails to your subscribers can be just as damaging as sending too often. Email recipients often expect to be notified on a monthly basis, maybe more or less frequent depending on your expectations when they opted-in. Exercise discipline when maintaining a quality email relationship with your subscribers.
If you plan on changing your email delivery schedule, let them know. Some marketers allow subscribers to self-segment into “Daily,” “Weekly” or “Monthly” communications. This reduces spam complaints and allows recipients to receive messages when they want them (not when you do).
A Costly Mistake
The cost of making these email mistakes will vary by the type of business you have. Undoubtedly, it will often cost you valuable email relationships as people unsubscribe. If you don’t adhere to best practices, your email service provider could drop you for spam.
There is a laundry list of to-dos and don’t-dos out there but it really comes down to one thing: respect. Respect your subscribers’ needs and interests and they will reciprocate. These top three mistakes small business email marketers do are often overlooked until after they’ve shot themselves in the foot. Consider this advice before you send your next email marketing broadcast.
To learn more about email marketing best practices, download a free report about Email Marketing 2.0.
Best Practics: Getting Traffic to Your Website
Getting traffic to your website is and should be a top concern for anyone with, or planning to create, a website. No matter what community online I spend time interacting with, the common question of how to get more traffic to your website is raised. It makes perfect sense.
The whole purpose of the website is to inform customers, and to create relationships with new customers. You’ll notice it states: Create relationships with new customers, and NOT get new customers. Those days are gone, and social media is a driving force restoring best practices that focus upon building relationships with people, as people. Along this journey into social media, there were many marketers who used this effectively with poor practices that result in damaged relationships. This article focuses upon the outcomes of this journey, and re-establishes the tried and true considerations for maintaining and promoting a website.
Blogging
Content is still King. Keywords are a must for organic search engine traffic, and for improving ranking for the correct keywords. Adding fresh content regularly through blogging is the easiest method, whether the blog be identified as a Press Release, a Blog, a Journal, or a News channel for your website and company. These tools are easily adapted to suit your professional and personal needs.
Keywords
Keywords are the foundation from which your content is built, and if you are starting a website, an important consideration to include when purchasing a domain name. Vanity names are cute, keyword rich domains find traffic faster. Thinking like your consumer or target audience, your keyword considerations come from the perspective of them using search, rather than only focusing upon what you offer.
Link-Building
Understanding keywords, and content, effective link-building can be achieved to greater effectiveness. Many sites exist for bookmarking, sharing links, and social media that rank very high in search engines. Adding your links with titles and or descriptions rich with your keywords helps create more highly effective back-links which will get scored by search engines. These campaigns create traffic, help build page rank, and improve your search engine optimization efforts.
Social Media
Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and hosts of niche-specific sites, are tremendous assets in your marketing for your website. People build relationship connections, and begin and/or nurture relationships on social media websites. Conversations occur back and forth, links are shared, information is added to conversation, and recommendations are made. Look to serve others, help them, and build a foundation that earns respect. When information leading back to your site is shared, more influence from your efforts is felt through increased traffic.
Email Marketing
Marketing is not sales, marketing is sharing information that is useful to your audience. Your audience signs up to receive news from you about your company, and about your industry. Their interest requires thoughtful sharing of information that retains their loyalty, and keeps your brand present and recognized with a sense of loyalty or appreciation. Offering tips, insights, informative articles, videos, and statistics, there are many options available to you that earn respect, and create traffic. Emails should always be brief, with an enticing link back to your website to further satisfy their curiosity.
Link in the Signature
How often do you email others, either creating a fresh email, or responding to something? A surprising number of people with websites to promote do send emails without including their website link with their signature in the email. Many email programs offer a setting to automatically add a signature with every email. Don’t be spammy, but do put your basic contact details with your web-link. You would print it on a business card and letterhead, so why not your email signature?
Don’t Stop
The most disappointing result I experience with any client comes about as they complete their website implementation and they decide that this is all they need. You have just invested capital of time and money into developing a marketing channel. I deliberately choose the word channel to draw your attention to the fact that today’s technology on the web is interactive; a broadcast medium. You won’t sit day after day in front of a television watching the same re-run. Your website needs a marketing budget and strategy that develops this kind of broadcasting ability.
Getting it Right
Is there such a thing? Time has taught me that it is the process, not the outcome, that generates the most leverage in life, business, and creativity. Taking the principles shared thus far, understand that there is no better time to start than right now! So it costs money, and you may have a limited budget. Starting where you are, and building up month after month, goals will be realized. Don’t wait for all the conditions to be right, all the budget to be identified, all the designs and content in place. Early launches and using the technology and principles shared, the intelligent feedback received and observed provides valuable direction to the process of building, launching, and managing growing websites.
Feedback
As with this website, welcoming feedback is advantageous to most website owners. It stimulates conversations that can better inform you about your audience or market area. Make it easy for your website visitors to interact and connect with you, and do provide links to your other online distribution channels such as your Fan Page on Facebook, a Twitter profile you’ve got running, or some other social media profile.
And what about your feedback? After reading this post, what questions remain? Use the comment form to post your question, or share other useful advice you’ve learned with your own website.