Your website should still be the center of your marketing efforts; however, to make this happen you now have to have a marketing plan that drives traffic to your website. How do you do this? Through a variety of tools that include some variations of the following:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Press Releases
- Social Networking
- Blogging
- Article Marketing (to include possible syndication)
- Newsletters
- Internet Advertising
- Video or Podcasting
- Viral Campaigns
- Pay per clicks
- E Books
- White papers
The key to marketing success is learning what people are looking for and where they are looking. The internet has become ubiquitous in our world. A smart marketer will build a keyword-rich webpages and websites based on those words.
The future of information marketing is in the social networks that are popping up all over the internet. Facebook, Biznik, and other networks are growing in popularity. Engaging prospects and customers on social sites has now become a critical part of a focused marketing plan.
Just because you launch an awesome site and announce it in social websites does that mean you will get the traffic you are looking for? Of course not! If only it were that simple! Planning and creating an amalgam of methods that reaches out to the world at large and begins to create an audience. Your marketing plan must:
- Catch the audience’s attention
- Generates interest
- Provides useful or helpful information that solves a specific customer problem
- Create and opportunity for your target audience to take action
One inexpensive way to do this is to create newsletters, eBooks, and white papers. But how do you get those to your audience? How do you create the audience? Through opt-in methods that are permission driven. Give them something of perceived value to get their name and email address in order to build a database of contacts. A good newsletter contains relevant information that benefits your audience. It also helps that audience to learn more about you and your company so they can build the trust required to potentially make a purchase in the future. Newsletters and eBooks help personalize your business and create a positive perception of you and your business when done well.
Public relations is a marketing and management tool that attempts to promote a company’s image, product or service and to counteract negative publicity on occasion. To do this public relations use news releases, feature stories, newsletters, to reach different media and audiences. Public relations is do is targeted at establishing goodwill and warm fuzzies. It is a valuable tool for reaching a broad audience cheaply with your message.
Successful public relations campaigns:
- Set realistic goals
- Provide valuable pertinent information from an expert source
Brand marketing done effectively implements a clear, consistent message. People often purchase an item based on the perception that the product or service will be the same each time. A simple effective message that comes through loud and clear through its delivery is incredibly effective. Think of Nike’s latest branding message of “Just do it!” Short but effective, we know exactly what they mean.
So how do you plan to integrate your brand image into a message that conveys itself both on line and in print? Once internet brand marketing was nothing more than a website that you hope through random luck someone visited. In today’s internet world there are a variety of marketing methods you can use to market your business and develop your brand on online.
I have a son who at a young age wanted to start a business painting 911 curb addresses in the neighborhood. We lived in an area where the snow plows regularly scraped the numbers off. His startup wasn’t a bad idea. He just wasn’t sure of how to close the sale. He had stencils; he had the pre-requisite black and white cans of spray paint. He beta tested his process on our curb and on the neighbors’. He had practiced all his techniques but his “elevator speech.” His father pressed him to try and “sell” him a painted curb. My son inhaled and began with a stammer, followed by a stutter, and then a long string of “ahhhs and uhhhs.” His dad asked him, “Do you know what you want to tell me?” Long pause followed by a deep inhale and a sob. His dad asked him, “What are you selling? Why do people need to buy what you are selling? Why are you the one to hire for this service?” My son paused for a minute and then said through the curtain of frustrated tears, “Dad, I don’t know why they should hire me. I guess ’cause I do a good job.” Shrugging his shoulders he turned to walk away. His dad stopped him, “Boy! Are you a man or a mouse?” My son without missing a beat said, “I don’t know dad, but I sure like cheese!” He had no clue what his message was or how to get it out effectively…he just knew he liked money.
Integrated marketing is about building and maintaining brand awareness and identity. Good integrated marketing sends a coordinated series of different but related messages through different kinds of media thus increasing the chance or reaching and persuading the target audience. Perhaps the most critical part of an integrated marketing campaign is to maintain a consistent theme in your message.
Publicizing your blog is not as hard as you might think. Compelling content is not enough to create a dedicated large following. It takes a little work and exposure on other sites and blogs to build your readership.
You can self-promote to other blogs by writing a brief post on other blogs that have a similar topic. Send a brief introduction of yourself to 2-3 bloggers who you would like to trade links.
Another way to publicize your blog is to ping major weblog tracking sites. Once you are blogging regularly and have a month’s worth of entries submit your blog to a blog directory and to weblog tracking sites.
You have to include your permanent main blog URL to these directories. If you don’t you may point them to a URL for an old entry and not anchor the complete blog site. Don’t overlook listing your blog with social bookmarking sites:
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Digg.com
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StumbleUpon
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Reddit
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Del.icio.us
Blogging is branding. Branding allows your audience to see your expertise through your own unique blogging personality. It also shows your business’ uniqueness in the market place and clearly demonstrates how you are different from your competitors. The value of blogging:
· Builds a sense of community
· Positions you or your company as informed about the community and their unique needs or perspective
· Provides a great platform for introducing new ideas or material
· Gets your name and contact information out there in yet another visible location
· Provides a forum to present all that great content you had to cut from your book
When customers become familiar and comfortable with a particular brand they gravitate toward it when in need of that good or service. By creating this helpful community in your blog, your company and your name become known for its value. People buy from those whom they know, recognize, and make an emotional connection.
Blogging and article writing for the web have two things in common:
How do you know when you have the right amount of keywords embedded in your work to keep the SEO spiders hungry for more and not overstuffed? First, if the writing is natural and flows normally, the spiders will be happy and will return again and again. Keyword stuffing is a naughty practice of unethical bloggers who are trying to drive adsense dollars to their site. Fortunately, this ends up backfiring for many of these smarty pants bloggers and they get their blogs banned if they continue to misbehave.
Keyword stuffing is when you use words over and over in a way that the work is impossibly silly to read. For example, if you were to encounter the following sentence what would be your gut reaction:
John went to John’s uncle’s store to buy John’s mother a can of beans and John’s sister a bag of chips and John a pack of gum.
What keyword do you think the author was trying to embed? No one speaks or writes this way naturally. The spider’s know this and really resent landing on these types of sites.
Keywords should appear in your title, headings, and scattered naturally as they occur in your writing. Writing well is important. Engage your audience by offering value through your words. This will keep the audience returning to your work again and again and the spiders will still get fed.
Keyword rich articles, web pages, and blogs are critical if you want to keep SEO spiders fed. Keywords are what anchor searches to your entries on the web. They are also want vendors who are looking for ad space want to hook their ads to as well.
There are people who try to beat the system and who only manage to kill their own writing efforts. There is an old saying, “Winners never cheat and Cheaters never win.” This adage holds true in the use of keywords and their misuse by some nefarious bloggers and website owners. But the people who own those SEO spiders are pretty smart and they know what is really happening. Pretty soon the cheaters’ plans back fire on them and they either get shut down or get nasty threats from the legal department of someone’s business.
So what are they doing that is raunchy and ill mannered abuse of key words?
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Irrelevant Key words - Using words irrelevant to page content to generate traffic. For example, let’s say my blog site is all about dog food and dog food brand comparisons. But I know that the most popular blog topic of the week is “how to blog”. How to blog and dog food have NOTHING to do with each other. If I have loose blogging morals I might try and stuff “how to blog” in my dog food conversation to drive more traffic to my site.
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Key Word Stuffing- Repeating the same word over and over and over in a web page or blog entry. Some even go so far as to repeat the same keyword rich paragraph verbatim on the page. There is actually a tool called the “key word density cloud” to test if your page has keyword density overkill.
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Splogging- Prolific plagiarists who steal your blog content or your article content and post it as their own are dirty rotten sploggers. While mimicry is often called the highest form of flattery…stealing is stealing! All they want is your article and the web traffic that goes with it.
Finding the right amount of keywords for your site is similar to dieting, you have to find the right balance that works for you. To keep you spiders happy and healthy, use keywords in moderation and drive your site responsibly!
Blog titles, blog headlines, and blog sub-headlines need to be ”sticky” for SEO spiders to crawl in and out of your work and catalog the content. Becoming a master of stickiness is much like become a master of yoga…you better be ready to put in the effort, study, and practice or you won’t make the cut!
Creating sticky titles and headlines takes a little bit of familiarity with the key words and ideas that are popular search terms in your niche on the web. This is not really a closely guarded secret. With a little research in Google and other Search Engines you will find what works best for driving traffic to your blog and expanding your audience.
Sticky Headlines:
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Incites interest – Titles that are provocative or controversial stimulate the reader’s interest. They act to inflame the emotions of the reader who feels compelled to stay and read.
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Questions and Queries – Headlines that ask questions and raise uncertainty keep the reader hooked. They will continue to read until resolution is achieved. These readers want answers and will hang around as long as they think the writer is working toward one.
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Benefits – Readers want to know that they will gain some kernel of information or knowledge from your work. They will hang around as long as there is something in it for them that promotes, assists, or gives them an advantage in their world.
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Power Words – Certain types of words appeal to readers who are looking for a bargain, a particular benefit, or are trying to solve a problem. Words like ‘benefits,’ ‘rewards,’ ‘secret’ and ‘free’ all make readers pause. If you reveal a secret or provide breaking news you will capture reader attention.
Accurate, clear and concise titles that truly relate to your main topic are crucial to the success of your individual blog entries. Think of each headline as a definition of your article. If you stick to that and use keywords that define your article’s content you will attract readers and search engines.
Longer titles are often more persuasive giving readers the extra “hook” that gets them to stick around and read the content. Make sure the title is not so long that the keywords are lost on the reader. People scan headlines they don’t really read them carefully. Make the title jump out and grab the reader, holding their interest.
Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction.
- Subject – Determine your primary theme for each entry and stay on it! Never stray or your readers will jump ship like rats leaping off the Titanic. If you are not clear on the topic discussed in a particular entry for your blog, how do you expect your readers to follow along? A simple thesis statement will help you stay focused on the theme.
- Informs the Reader – Chatty news that wastes a reader’s time is annoying and serves no purpose. Have something of merit to say. It does not have to be earth shattering but it should make them think.
- Originality - If the reader does not feel that they walk away with a new piece of information or a new perspective they probably won’t come back to visit your blog again. Offer an innovative or creative view that provides the reader with that “aha” moment.
- Content – Clarity and simplicity make your content readable and “sticky”. Stickiness is important if you want to hook a reader and keep them engaged with your material. Too much information, too much detail, and too many meaningless adjectives make the content difficult to follow. Avoid jargon, techie terms, and extra adverbs (“ly” words) that add nothing to your content. Create compact segments of content that have sub-headings that act like directions to the key parts of your blog. Spell check and proof read all entries before and after they are ‘live’. You can and should go back in to edit if there are errors.
- Headlines and Keywords – Be bold and daring and keyword rich in constructing headlines. Remove articles (a, an, the) and prepositions from your title. This makes it easy for search engines to pick up your latest entry and blast it out on the web. Readers search Google, Lycos, and Mozilla by keywords, not sentences. Keep your headlines short. If you have ten words or more in your headline, you have probably said too much.
- Disciplined Blogging – Create a publishing schedule and stick to it. Perhaps you write a week or a month’s worth of blog entries in one sitting, you still have to faithfully log in and publish each entry. Put it on your day calendar right. If you schedule it in writing you are more likely to stick to your plan.
- Blogging Rate – frequency and regularity of blogging submissions does count. Search engine spiders will visit and notice you and your site if there is change in your site. Blog regularly, blog often, and blog well.
Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction. Shannon has over 17 years in the academic world teaching English composition to native and non-native speaking students.
Publishing consistently is a huge commitment but does not have to eat up large chunks of your time. If you create a schedule and put it on your calendar you can carve out time to write and post 2-3 times a week. Some people write once a week. They create all their articles for the week in a single sitting and then jump on-line each day to upload articles separately.
Finding Your Voice – Writing larger amounts at a single sitting will help you to find and establish your voice and the tone for your blog. Content that reflects the blog author’s personal experiences and “lessons learned” are more widely read then standard narratives.
What will you write about? How will you create a voice that readers will return to time and again? Statistically, blogs that relate on a personal level to readers are the ones that get the largest readership. Readers do not want to know about you and your business. They want to know about information and resources that help them in their business. Readers want to know about a problem you had and how you resolved it…not how you felt afterwards!
Writing Strategies
Provide your readers with:
- Stories of what you or a client or reader experienced that was a problem or a concern.
- Examples of decisions and actions that made a change or improved a process.
Your strategy for your blog should be to create a community that helps others or that provides a forum for readers. A reader focused blog encourages participation through shared experiences and suggested solutions. Encourage and foster that and your blog will take off and create an enthusiastic audience that sees you (the author) as an authority figure. Blogging can be a powerful author promotion and marketing tool.
About the Author: Shannon Evans, senior editor of www.mywritingmentor.com lives with her best friend Rick on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound just a “ferry ride from Seattle.” She works at her desk with her two Labrador virtual assistants, Mocha and Luke, and her feline copywriting assistants, Caesar and Yoda. She is widely recognized as one of the top writing coaches to authors of non-fiction. Shannon has over 17 years in the academic world teaching English composition to native and non-native speaking students.
