Best of the Net: SEO, Marketing and Social

It is often said that if you want to get rich, you will need to think about making your own money rather than finding employment from someone else. This is true because when you decide to go down this road, the limit of how much you can make only depends on how hard you are willing to work. If you end up working very hard, chances are that you will make it, sometimes even more than you had expected.

To get there, however, you will need to go through a number of things. The most important of these is knowing how to relate with your customers in such a manner that they can trust you more. When you are going into business for the first time, you will be going up against a lot of competition, which means that if you don’t try to make yourself look presentable in the eyes of your customers you may end up losing out. Some of the things you will need to think about in doing this include:

How professional you look

When you are going into business, you need to remember that most people heavily rely on looks when making decisions on whether to work with others or not. This means that you may need to invest money into making yourself look more professional than the other businessmen out there. This can be done using simple measures such as getting high quality business cards and investing in a number of good suits so that you can look like a pro when you go for meetings. These things may seem very simple, but they normally have tremendous effects on your customers’ psyche.

The way you interact with your customers

When you need to make a new business successful, you will need to keep an eye on how you interact with your customers. This include things such as making sure that you keep your deadlines and that you also make sure that you communicate with them in a professional manner. The benefit of doing this is that it increases the confidence that they have in you, which means that they will be more likely to do business with you again in future or even refer other people to you.

In summary, if you are keen on making your new business more successful, you should not only concentrate on issues to do with the quality of your goods or services. You also need to make sure that you create the right impression with your customers as well.

Do you sell online?

You may have hired an SEO consultant or invested in a PPC campaign to drive traffic to your web site. Turning those visits into sales is critical and many web sites fail to do so or they do it at a very poor rate.

While you may have spent time refining your page titles and your copy, here are 5 more important areas not to overlook:

1. Security Concerns

If you’ve got a potential customer to your web site and even convinced them to add a product to their cart, you still have to close the deal and complete the sale. “Shopping cart abandonment” is a big issue for the e-commerce industry and is something which is analyzed heavily by all the big online retailers. To convince the customer to hand over his/her personal details and card information requires trust. You can help engender that trust by making it clear that your site is secure – invest in an SSL Certificate, display any logos or badges issued by your SSL provider and place a statement on the site confirming your commitment to data security and data privacy. It will go a long way in creating trust with your audience.

2. No Phone, Address or Social Media activity visible

Similar to number 5, its essential to create trust with your visitors. Display your phone number and address prominently. Get a proper business address and a business phone number. Most visitors won’t call, but they will be reassured that there is a number advertised just in case they need it. It shows you are real and not trying to hide. Similarly, social media connections are also a great way to establish trust – they show you are real and in a way provide live testimonials about your product or service (don’t forget to keep on top of comments posted!).

3. Checkout process

Simplify your checkout process as much as possible. Users lose patience very quickly these days. Time is money as the old saying goes. Add a “guest checkout” if this is supported by your shopping cart software. Anything which makes it easier for the user to hand over their card details and complete the transaction will boost your conversion rate.

4. Mobile traffic

Mobile traffic is growing at a phenomenal rate. If your site doesn’t work well on a smartphone and your checkout isn’t mobile friendly, you won’t convert a thing. Don’t waste mobile traffic. Use a mobile theme if your shopping cart support it or redesign your site so it’s mobile friendly. Find a web design agency with mobile development experience and don’t miss out on mobile traffic.

5. Testimonials

Testimonials, references and even comments from existing customers on social media can make or break a sale. Testimonials should of course be real and prominently placed. Don’t forget to keep on top of your social media pages and carefully manage any negative comments or unhappy customers who might drop in on your page, you can still turn it into a winner for your business.

The majority of the globe’s largest and most successful business organizations make use of internet adverts and cheap email marketing campaigns. For instance, Google regularly sends or forwards email newsletters to its AdSense or AdWords users. Social media networks for their popularity with the masses still forward email updates to individuals on their network. As such, email marketing is one of the world’s most popular and used types of internet marketing.

To the small and medium businesses, this inexpensive email marketing option becomes even more important today than it was before. To say the truth, email marketing is a crucial tool to be used by all small and medium business owners due to the fact that it is fast, cheap and easy to utilize. Inexpensive email marketing generates quite fast responses from target audience not forgetting that its worldwide reach, however, it has to be properly carried out.

To prevent consumer backlash, email marketing need to be done correctly. The following tips will help you develop best, optimal and winning strategy for marketing campaign.

a. Settle for better and optimal forms of inexpensive email marketing

It is good to regularly test an email marketing strategy to see if it is working. It is recommended that you use it until you have come up with a better alternative. Be sure to try and improve your current marketing strategy for it to achieve the desired results.

b. Track and make reports of your email marketing campaign

Monitor the ongoing email marketing campaign on a regular basis in order to realize its effectiveness. Discover what actually works and go or stick to it. All that isn’t working should then be dropped or done away with.

c. Make social media a close friend

Email marketing and social networks should be linked together to help boast your marketing campaign. After doing this, invite all your subscribers to join you in your preferred social networks. Leverage the influence the chosen social networks have to add more clients or consumers to an existing or new emailing list.

d. Offer usable freebies

Free stuff like trial items, sample products, sweepstakes, bonuses and the likes should be offered on a regular basis to clients both existing and new. Simply put, the said free stuff should accompany your email marketing campaign to help entice people to what you are promoting.

e. Timing, timing and more timing

The majority of successful email marketing gurus swear by timing. They advise that week days such as Mondays and Fridays aren’t ideal for email marketing campaigns due to the expected heavy workloads and weekend anticipation respectively. Apparently, no one likes being bothered or disturbed during the two end of the week days, Saturday and Sunday. The best days for email marketing campaigns therefore are Tuesdays to Thursdays.

Other tips to help optimize and hence have successful email marketing campaigns include going viral, use of varied forms of emails and getting emails white listed by your subscribers.

If you run your own business and you are looking for a great way to attract more customers through internet marketing, finding the right companies that can help you streamline your marketing approach might be the best thing in the world for growing your small business. Hiring a company that can blend local marketing outlets for you will save you a lot of time and money, so you want to be sure that you are looking for the company that fits the best with what your specific advertising needs are.

Looking for a Great SEO Company

As our economy becomes more technologically based, getting your brick and mortar store a web presence has never been more important. There are many companies that have moved away from the traditional methods of business ownership, converting their business to online only ventures; but it doesn’t matter if you are one of those companies, or one of the many business owners that still has a physical store front from which you do business, getting your company a strong online presence is very important in order to maximize your profits. So what is search engine optimization (SEO) anyways, and how will it benefit your company. There are many companies out there in our modern business world that specialize in generating high visit rates to your company’s website through improving your web presence. By creating content that links to your company’s website they improve your visibility to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, as your website becomes more visible to these search engines you start to get higher rankings on their search results. By getting your company onto the first page of an internet search you are getting more views from potential customers which will lead to more people visiting your website and purchasing your products or services. Many companies have turned to these SEO companies to increase their brand recognition and improve their sales; it is one of the greatest business tools created in our modern internet based business world.

Finding the Company that is Right for You

When you are looking for a company that can blend local marketing services to benefit your company’s profits, a few things that you want to look for are things like guarantees, high success rates and options. If a company is so sure that they can produce the results that you want, and they are willing to offer you a guarantee they are worth reading more about. While any company can offer a guarantee, looking at their success rates is a good way to see if you’ll ever have to take them up on their offer, the idea here is to get the services that you want and the results you want; not cash in on the guarantee when the fail to meet your expectations. So look for a company that is so proud of their past result that they are willing to offer you a good guarantee. The next thing that you want to look for is price options. Not ever company has the same budget for advertising, so looking for a company that has several options will help you get started with a smaller budget, and then work your way up as your profits increase. If you look for these things in an SEO company, you will be more than satisfied with the work that they will do for you, so start looking around and pick the company that works best with your needs, and get busy making more money.

When it comes to finding the most recent and important news in the world of online and affiliate marketing you have a lot of options. From make money online bloggers, to those who focus on SEO and social networking… there is simply way too many blogs out there for you to visit on an individual and daily basis.

However, blogs are still one of the best ways for internet marketers to not only find information and training tips online, but it also allows them to stay up to date on the current trends and actually connect with other bloggers and marketers in their space.

So what’s an internet marketer to do?

You can look at your favorite affiliate marketing blogs and hope they they have updated since the last time you visited their site, or you may even subscribe to their mailing lists or rss feeds. The problem with this is that on a mass scale you will end up getting way too many emails and spend too much time visiting sites individually. This method works well if you have a few set blogs that you like to visit every day, but there are better solutions if you like to bring all of the affiliate marketing world’s content together in one spot.

One of the best ways to find the latest online marketing news is by following news syndication sites like Affposts, AffBuzz and AffDaily.

Affposts.com, created by Luke Kling, is one of the most recent sites to syndicate news content and they are quickly becoming the go-to source for affiliate marketing news. In addition to sorting posts based on how recently they were released, you can also view them based on popularity as well. You also have the option to join their daily email newsletter and have the top daily posts sent right into your email.

All of the sites mentioned above follow all of the major affiliate marketing blogs online and post the most recent and hottest blog content on their sites. This is great for anyone who is looking to find a summary of everything that is out there without the need to spend more than a few minutes and visit each blog individually.

In addition to following your favorite affiliate marketing blogs through these news syndication sites, you should also take the time to subscribe any like any specific social networking pages (facebook, google+ and twitter) that are created specifically for their blog followers. By doing this you will have their most recent blog posts and news sent right to your social networking account and feed.

Are you thinking about finding a way to advertise your business or services? Do you want to let others know about a product you are selling? When you are thinking about letting people know about what you have to offer, you will definitely want to think about Internet marketing. Being online can be one of the best things you can do in order to get yourself out there and make your services available to a whole new group of people. Plus, it’s a lot of fun.

How to Get Started?

When you are thinking about appealing to a new group of people online, you will want to make sure that you have an online presence. You will need to look into getting a website, first and foremost. A Professional site can help you gain new interest in your product or services, and it often takes very little money and time to set up something you can be happy with. You want a site that represents what you do as a company and shows off what you have to offer new customers.

What about Facebook and Twitter?

Another thing you should think about is getting a Facebook and Twitter profile for your business. Both of these sites allow you to keep in contact with potential clients and allow you to keep them updated with what is going on in your business. Whether you want to share a new event that is going on or you just want to let them know that you have some new products on the shelves, having a social media profile can let people who might not have known about your business that you are around and that they might want to stop by and take a look at what you have or chat with some of your employees.

The World Is Changing

The Internet has changed how we contact others. Instead of simply using basic banners and signs to let others know about their businesses, we now can connect to a whole bunch of new people who might be interested in what our businesses have to offer them. It’s instantaneous and also fun. So when you are thinking about making some changes to the way you get the word out to your potential clients, Internet marketing can be a great way to do it. When you are thinking about starting a new business or you want your current one to succeed, it is definitely worth looking into creating both a Facebook and a Twitter page that can attract new customers and let them know what you are all about. You want others to know how great your business is and all the quality products or services that you offer to your clients. When you need to get the word out, think of doing it in a new way—a way that is new and exciting and shows your customers that you want them to be a part of the success of your store, business, or personal services.