Website designers

Google, and other search engines, live on content. It is like water to them as they drink in the millions of words created on the web every day to help direct people to information. One of the best ways to improve your search engine optimization and increase web traffic is by providing a constant stream of new content on your site. This can be daunting and time consuming to most business owners, so they may look at hiring a content provider.

Not all content providers are the same! Some companies specialize in SEO work designed just for you, while others may sell you content that is shared with dozens of other companies. There are even companies that you can hire to post in your forums to make them appear to be more popular than they really are.

 Before you even start to hire a content provider, look at what type of content you want. Is it something very industry specific? Most  content providers lack specific industry knowledge, so you might be better off paying one of your staff to take on the content position. Also, find out the background of the content writers. Many large content providers sub-contract your job to college students or stay-at-home-mothers who have no specialized training or skills.

A better, and more affordable option, is to find your own personal content writer instead of hiring an agency to act as the middle man. Craigslist and other job boards have made it easy to find content writers. In fact, many content providing companies use these same boards to find their writers. By hiring them directly you will have more control over a project as well as pay less money.

The important thing is to find someone who can understand your brands voice. The style of content on a surf shop site should be different than an investment bank. The tone of the content on your pages all becomes part of your branding. Having a writer who knows you , and your brand, is very important. Which is why it’s important you have someone you know and trust behind those words.

Your blog is all about your readers, and obviously, the more of a core following you are able to build, the more valuable your blog will be when it comes to getting you business.

The thing is that people today are busy - and forgetful. Maybe someone really found your blog useful and interesting, but then simply never finds the time to check beck, or just plain forgets about you. You’ve just lost a reader and that’s a pity.

But there’s a way to keep as many of those interested readers as possible, and that is to offer them an easy way to subscribe to your blog feed so that they are notified whenever you post something new. For you jargon-haters, your blog feed is simply a stream of your latest blog posts that is updated automatically as you add new material.

While there are literally thousands of different feed reader software and websites that people can use to subscribe to your blog and view your newest posts, all you have to do is to use a free blog feed subscription service like FeedBurner and your readers (or at least the vast majority of them) will be catered for. What’s more, FeedBurner lets you manage your blog feed in one place, and can also give you a whole range of options and some interesting statistics about who is reading your blog.

Of course, just having a subscription option will not count for much if you don’t promote it by prominently displaying an eye-catching ‘Subscribe to this blog’ button on your website. Also, it would be a great idea to actively ask readers to subscribe by means of a standard line of text after each blog post to the tune of, ‘If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to know when we publish our next one’. This will of course link to your blog subscription page.

Another thing you can easily do with FeedBurner is to give your readers the option to subscribe to your blog via e-mail. This is a very important thing to offer, because it allows you to make your blog accessible to all those many visitors who don’t use feed readers for whatever reason.

Turning casual blog visitors into regular readers is a key part of making your blog work, and, assuming that you have good, informative content that is worth reading, all your visitors may need to get them to come back to your blog again and again is a way to do it easily and automatically.

Everyone likes free stuff - as long as it’s useful - and one great way to spread your company’s name around over the Internet is to offer something valuable for free on your website.

The key to the success of such an Internet marketing initiative is that the freebie you offer has to be something that people are likely to recommend and pass out to each other. That way, you gain access to a much wider audience than just those people visiting your website. What’s more, if your giveaway is popular enough that people begin to blog about it, it will be even more successful still.

Offering some kind of report or ‘how-to’ is one possibility, but information is so easily available on the Internet that you really have to find something unique for it to take off.

A better idea is to give away a simple software program that will be very useful to your potential clients. Even if you have absolutely no idea about anything to do with computers, getting someone to write such a program is much cheaper than you might imagine, and you can easily get several quotations for your project on websites like www.rentacoder.com and www.ifreelance.com.

The Good Keywords application in one example of such a piece of free software, aimed at people who want to find out what popular search keywords they should be targeting on their websites. All this simple application does is to offer an easy-to-use interface to Yahoo!’s cumbersome search terms database together with a couple of other bells and whistles. Yet, this piece of software spread like wildfire among the web design and Internet marketing circles and even as far as individual website owners who wanted to dabble in their own website SEO. Of course, the whole idea behind the Good Keywords program is that it links back to its publisher’s website, where you can buy more advanced versions of the program and other related software packages.

Even if your business is not related in any way to computers or the Internet, with a little brainstorming you can most probably come up with some kind of useful software to offer to your potential clients. For example, if you sell health foods or related products, you could offer a diet planner and calorie calculator; if you offer business-related consultancy, you could give away an application that shows up the latest stock prices and other relevant data, pulled from a database; if you sell DIY supplies, you could perhaps offer an application that helps users make calculations related to their projects. The limit is your imagination!

Once you have your freebie, you just have to put it out there and help it along with some active Internet marketing, by, for example, promoting it on Internet forums related to your field.

Another excellent for promoting your freebie and make the most of it is to allow other businesses to add their branding to it (together with yours of course) and give it out to their clients. This can be done quite easily by giving them an option to upload their logo and web address to your website and automatically sending them a customized version of the program or other freebie for them to distribute.

With a bit of thought to find a great idea and the few hundred dollars it would probably cost you to develop something useful, this could very well be one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing ventures you ever undertake. Thinking caps on!

Upselling is a great way to add onto your profit with only a little extra effort. You probably are aware of upselling, even if you’ve never heard the term. “Would you like fries with that,” is a classic upselling example. Those few words make you pause and possibly buy the fries too. If it doesn’t work, they haven’t lost anything, since you are still buying your original order.

Good ideas of upselling in your business could be offering like products or things like batteries in a step before checkout. If you are a service provider you can add on a free trial of your service or a consultation.

But in this dark economic time upselling isn’t enough, you also need to master the art of downselling. This means having a lesser priced product or service available to a customer who needs to cancel his order for economic reasons. If they can’t afford your 24 hour on-call service, offer them the office hours service package. If they need to cancel their order for 300 items, offer them a discount on an order of 150.

Downselling is important because it’s better to get a partial sale than to get nothing. Also, by keeping these customers happy they will be more likely to stick with you when the economy turns back around.

 No matter the nature of your business - whether you build luxury villas or sell crochet and knitting supplies online - you can be sure that there are people searching the Internet for advice on a whole variety of topics related to what you do. The more content you have on your website about these topics, the more likely you are to show up when people search on related keyword terms.

Blogging and writing web articles are both excellent ways to build up a volume of relevant content on your website, but have you ever thought of starting an Internet forum?

Err… what’s an Internet forum?

Knowingly or not, you have probably used online forums already. An Internet forum is simply a part of your website where people can sign up for free and communicate with you and each other, typically to discuss topics, ask questions and help each other out with advice.

When someone has a question to ask, they start a new topic (called a thread) and other visitors to the forum who have something to say on the matter reply with posts in the same thread.

Why should my business have its own forum?

Having a forum on your website has many benefits. For a start, your forum can take off some of the customer support load from your shoulders, both because you can answer questions there and then refer people with the same question to the answer you have already given, and also because, in many cases, other forum users will take the initiative and do it for you.

What’s more, your forum will quickly become a valuable resource and community for your customers to enjoy, meaning that they have a reason to keep returning to your website to pose their questions and read about the latest tips from other users.

And maybe the most important benefit of having a forum is that specific forum pages quickly turn into masses of repeated keywords related to the topic being discussed. This means that if the forum’s content is public and viewable by all, the search engines will find it and add it to their index, just as if it were an article that you had written from scratch, so that people searching the Internet could find your forum, and consequently your website.

How to start an Internet forum

One part of starting your online forum involves installing the relevant software and getting it up and running. There is a wide range of forum software to choose from, including a number of free ones. Your web designer will be able to advise you on what is most suitable for your needs and set things up for you.

The other part is to get people to participate. No one goes to a party that no one else is going to, and the same thing applies to Internet forums. In other words, while a forum can generally be left to its own devices once it becomes popular, you will have to put in some effort into getting the activity going in the first place.

If you already have a solid customer base asking you questions by e-mail or otherwise, you have it easy if you can persuade them to consider using your forum to ask their questions publicly - you can then answer on the forum and other users can share their experiences too.

Otherwise, you will have to jump-start your Internet forum yourself, either by taking up different personae and posting and answering common questions, or else by roping in employees and friends or paying people to do it (check websites like iFreelance.com or Elance.com if you’re looking for affordable forum posters).

As your Internet forum grows, it will develop into a living, breathing community of people who share an interest in your field and who are all potential clients of yours. Your forum pages will turn into gateways into your website and also highly visited web pages where you can display adverts for your own products and services.

What’s hot now isn’t as important as what is going to be hot tomorrow. Trying to figure out what the new emerging trends are going to be is essential to marketing your business, unless you want to get stuck with a bunch of pet rocks!

Here are 3 ways to I.D. hot trends

1. Google Trends- Google Trends is a free service from google that lists the top 100 most searched terms throughout the day. Looking at the terms that are hot now can let you notice patterns that can give you an edge. Or at least give you popular keywords to use to drive traffic to your page.

2. Ask Why- When you see a trend in your own business, always ask why. Why are we always selling out of red items but not blue? Don’t be afraid to send an email to your customers asking them about it. Who knows, maybe blue has been deemed unhip by the powers that be and you need to stop making them completely.

Your customers are your best sources of information. Use them! Which brings us to #3.

3) Create your own focus group- A focus group? That sounds expensive and hard. The truth is that it is easier than it sounds. Do you have a core group of customers who love your product? Ask them to join a special club where they can try new products and get discounts in exchange for sharing their honest feedback with you. This is a great way to learn what motivates your best customers in order to improve your marketing.

Just like many things in life, economic recessions come and go in cycles, and even though there is nothing official about a full-blown US recession yet, talk of the current downturn and impending doom is everywhere.

In such times, many businesses seem to have a kneejerk reaction of cutting down on their marketing as the first expendable thing on the list. Of course, this suicidal behavior is just the opposite of what you should be doing if you want your business to make it through the tough times. Rather than slashing your marketing budget, you need to be looking for savvier ways to market your business both online and off.

Writing in his blog, Seth Godin gives some precious insight into how you should be revising your business message and the way you market, based on a changing set of reasons for people to buy from you, and how you should adapt your marketing accordingly. But there’s more to it than that - you need to find smarter and more cost-effective ways to market too!

Smart marketing is easier online

Marketing on the Internet has two big advantages that will help see you through this economically difficult period.

For a start, there are a lot of things you and your employees can do yourselves - practically for free - such as blogging or publishing regular podcasts or vodcasts.

What’s more - and this is the big one - when you market online, it is so much easier to track and test how well your marketing efforts are doing. Whether you are running a pay-per-click ad campaign, blogging, or just want to get the best out of your website, you need to know how well every single thing you do is working. This way you are able to constantly improve on what you’ve got and avoid blowing your money on what doesn’t work. Of course, if your budget is tight, this sort of efficiency stops being a luxury and becomes a must.

The good news is that there are many online tools that will give you just this sort of information, including Google Analytics, which is free to use. With the help of a program like Google Analytics you can tell exactly where your website visitors are coming from and even follow the trends of what they do once on your website. This way, you can find out all sorts of interesting and important information, such as which web pages, blog posts etc are most popular, which ones convert best into sales, and which pages visitors are most likely to make visitors leave your website, just to give a few examples.

This sort of knowledge is vital if you want to optimize your web site and your internet marketing strategy to be as effective and efficient as possible at generating sales, leads or whatever you are after.

The ability to make the best use of all the available technologies to market smarter and more effectively will surely be one of the factors that determine which businesses will weather the coming storm and which ones will be washed away in the swell. Act now before it’s too late!

Whom are you more likely to believe? A company blowing its own trumpet, or a recommendation by a satisfied customer?

That is why, no matter what product or service you are selling, it is a good idea to have customer reviews or comments prominently displayed on your website.

Put word-of-mouth marketing into your website

Word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful because it is very believable and largely perceived to be unbiased. And a customer review is just another form of word of mouth, just like one friend speaking to another.

Most of your customers will be happy to give you feedback to reward good service if you ask - just don’t forget to get their permission in writing before attributing their names to a quote on your website. What’s more, if you can get a picture of the client to go with their recommendation, that will make the comment that much more credible still.

Internet shoppers turn to online reviews for buying advice

The average Internet shopper today is familiar with the idea of seeking out other customers’ opinions on a company’s products or services, and more and more people are basing their buying decisions on these very same reviews. In fact, it could very well be that people who find online reviews of your competitors, but not of your company, might assume that you are either new on the market or simply not very popular.

Of course, people already have several ways - such as blogs and forums - to comment on your business online, and the news of a good or bad service can spread faster than ever with today’s technologies.

So why not take things a step further and give your customers some space on your own website where they can upload a review using a personalized username and password that you give them? This kind of customer review will hold much more sway with skeptical visitors who might suspect that any reviews you put up yourself have been handpicked or manipulated.

A few negative reviews can be positive too

Don’t be afraid of getting the odd negative review if you give your customers a voice. One or two negative reviews in a flood of positive ones will only serve to emphasize that the reviews are genuine. In fact, readers are more likely to see the reviewers as difficult customers than your company as bad in such a case. Moreover, you can also respond to such reviews to clarify your position.

If, on the other hand, you’re getting a lot of negative reviews, then you seriously need to take stock of your business.

Another approach, if you have a catalogue of products, is to let customers review them on your website, much like you will probably be familiar with from companies like www.amazon.com. This will turn your website into a resource of information for other potential customers and at the same time allow you to easily find out why some products might be poor sellers so you are better able to choose better alternatives.

So maybe it’s time you let your customers do some of the talking for you and enjoyed the benefits that go with this marketing strategy.

When you want to share information with your target market you have lots of options. Should you use a blog, a podcast, or a vodcast (a video podcast)?

First, look at what your target market is. Are you selling to business people? If so, blogs are the best plan, since many business owners don’t have time to listen to podcasts or watch vodcasts. However, if you are trying to create a brand that resonates with young people or provides entertainment, then pod and vodcasts are a good idea.

<h1>Should I do a podcast or vodcast?</h1>

Some people make the mistake of thinking that they can just video tape their podcast recording and make it a vodcast. Boring! Video means you need to give people something to see. Either action scenes or product demos.

Really, this is where vodcasts win. It allows people to see your new products and understand how they work.

Ideally, you will use all three of these paths to get your information out there. Blogging continues to grow, but as broadband becomes more common people will download podcasts and vodcasts more often. You need to be there to give them the content they are looking for.