Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008

Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates.  Social and search marketing is clearly leading the way together with email & mobile marketing, website optimisation and Web PR strategies. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.   

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimise your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicise your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

1.  Optimise your website’s content

First and foremost, get your website content right.  Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines.  An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.  To ensure that the content is being indexed correctly by search engines, it is essential that a number of variables are applied correctly to each article, press release, media announcement, promotional copy or information content that is placed on the website.  SEO copywriting techniques should be applied to all content.

Benefit of Optimised Content:-

• Ensures that your website is identified as a subject matter expert
• Creates unique, relevant and superior content
• Prevents duplicate content
• Encourages correct page architecture
• Ensures correct theme alignment of related content
• Increases Search Engines Rankings for targeted keywords
• Increases traffic to the website
• Increases customers
• Increases turnover

2.  Create a content development strategy for your website

In addition to optimising the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis.  All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the search engines.  A website should acquire an adequate number of pages related to the specific subject matter in order to be seen as an expert in the specific industry.  The more frequently the website’s content is updated, the more frequently search engines will be able to spider and index the website appropriately and apply a suitable ranking to the websites individual pages of content.  

Benefits of Increasing Website Pages:-

• Ensures that the company is identified as a subject matter expert
• Encourages more frequent spidering by Search Engines
• Creates more opportunities (pages) for Search Engines to rank
• Increases content offered to visitors
• Creates additional content for theme alignment
• Improves inbound linking strategy
• Offers additional opportunities for internal and external linking

3.  Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website.  Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

Benefits of Paid Search Advertising:-

• Can achieve top ranking through paid search if not ranking through natural search
• It’s non-intrusive as you are reaching people when they are actively looking for information about your products and services online
• Send targeted visitors directly to your offering on your website
• Increases brand awareness
• Keeps your competitors off the pages
•  It’s scalable and controllable and you only pay when people click on your
• You can appear on search engines almost immediately

4.  Publicise your website through article marketing

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicise your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content.  To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Prior to submitting articles the content should optimised for search engines.  By submitting different versions of the article there is far more chance that pages displaying your article will avoid relegation, will maintain and grow Page Rank, and maintain the status of a high-quality non-duplicated content page.  Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.  

Benefit of Article Marketing:-

• The more articles you write, the more web sites will choose to publish your articles online, the more inbound links your site will receive
• More back links from articles increases the value, meaning that ranking in search
• Published pages have a higher Page Rank
• Generates long-term traffic directly as well as boosts your search engine rankings
• Enhances your reputation and credibility as a subject matter expert 

5.  Develop a social media marketing strategy

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place.  Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy.   Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation.  SMO will continue to get broader use from marketers interested in building traffic and buzz online, moving far beyond linking strategy and smart SEO into the marketing mainstream. 

One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online.  This will continue to lead online users to search beyond the algorithm for new ways of finding information.  A key method for this is where people are sorting content on the web, creating their own groupings and sharing that with others.   It is important that you continuously engage with social communities through reaching out to social communities to bring attention to your company or brand.  It is an effective means of off-site optimisation for your company’s website and ensures that your website is optimised for a broad range of content in every applicable media or vertical niche.   

Benefit of Social Media Marketing:-

• Brings attention to your brand
• Creates instant exposure
• More visibility for your company
• Encourages repeat visitors and shared content
• Improves search engine rankings 
• Strengthens your brand within a targeted or niche community
• Increases back links to your website
• Drives additional traffic to the website 

6.  Create a Company Blog

In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless.  This has changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality.  More and more companies are starting to realise the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive.  Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.   Companies should focus more time on establishing new touch points for customers to interact with the true personality of a brand.   Allowing your employees to Blog on your company Blog has many advantageous. 

Benefits of a Company Blog:-

• Blogs are search engine traffic magnets
• Positions your company to be a thought leader in your industry
• Gives you the power to publish at an instant making it a very powerful update tool and great for crisis handling
• Helps to build relationships with customers by engaging in conversation with them
• Provides an avenue for your to solicit feedback from your customers
• Puts a human voice to the company
• Encourages you to find out what others are saying about your company 

7.  Experiment with video marketing

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. Although South African companies still struggle with the bandwidth issue, globally video sharing has become increasingly popular.  Companies that provide the ability to syndicate your viral videos to Video Sharing websites will grow in popularity. 

As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing. As broadband penetrations increases in South Africa, streaming video will start to become a very popular marketing tool.  Whether a B2B or B2C marketer, video is an enormous opportunity to engage, educate and entertain.  Many brands are producing instructional videos to help customers install or use their product or service. Others create pure entertainment, hoping to build brand affinity or drive traffic to their website.

Benefits of a Video Marketing:-

• It is usually free to post video’s to video sharing websites
• Video’s are included in search engine results and usually receive high rankings
• Provides you with an opportunity to engage with your customer in an entertaining manner
• You are able to show the benefits of your products or service through visual education
• Increases the viral marketing potential for your business 

8.  Engage your audiences with web widget marketing

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months.  Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.    Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online. Audiences are becoming immersed in websites that provide cool and interactive marketing messages and companies have to find innovative ways to engage with these consumers. 

Web Widget Marketing will help companies keep up with its audiences and stay abreast of consumers, or at least stay ahead of competitors.   Web widgets cannot simply deliver an advertising message; it has to be a practical extension of the company’s brand.  It should provide a highly usefully application that is able to demonstrate the brand’s unique offering and can deliver on that promise. 

 Benefits of Web Widget Marketing:-

• Widgets are cool, slick and playful
• They spread quickly on Blogs and social network profiles
• Combines the power of brand propagation with interactive content and transactions
• Provides a platform for companies to introduce new products or services to an audience
• Creates an online connection with customers
• Can provide unprecedented access to hard-to-reach targets
• Offers branded entertainment to an audience

9.  Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there websites are mobile-friendly.   The mobile phone is a device on which we find all the traditional forms of advertising such as print, image and voice, wrapped into one small but widely used device. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.  

Benefits of Mobile Marketing:-

• Mobile campaigns are relatively easy to create and fast to execute
• Delivery of SMS messages to mobile phones is almost guaranteed
• You can market your messages to consumer mobile devices anytime and anywhere
• Text messages or personalised content is targeted to individuals who have opted to receive them
• Encourages viral marketing with the built-in tools for forwarding of the messages to the existing social networks 

10.  Create an effective email marketing strategy

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.   

You should focus on developing a strategy that combines a highly functional website with the power of direct-to-consumer email communications.  It is important to develop a close-loop strategy that incorporates careful planning, testing, execution and measurement of the success of your email marketing campaigns.   

Benefits of Email Marketing:-

• Increases lead generation and cross selling
• Increases customer lifetime value
• Low cost, instantaneous channel for sending messages
• Opens up a two-way dialogue with customers and prospects
• Hypercharges your existing marketing messages
• Instant, measurable results 

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!

The internets coming of age

Ever heard of the term Web 2.0? Have any idea what this is or what it means to web users? If you have any knowledge about this topic, congratulations, you are a step-ahead of most internet users and e-business owners.

The best way to explain Web 2.0 is as such; picture the World Wide Web as a toddler and for differentiating purposes we’ll name it Web 1.0. Like all children the web came into existence with much excitement and anticipation, a birth that would change the world forever. The “www” age set out on a course destined to develop, learn, make mistakes, fall once or twice, get back up and keep growing. Companies created websites detailing their products and services, educating internet users of their offerings. Individuals created home pages to publish personal information and detail their skills and interests. As users began learning the ways of the web, so the web too was learning. One of the biggest lessons that “little” web 1.0 learnt during its “childhood” education was; although there was a wealth of information spreading across the internet, its central focus revolved around reading and visitors to websites were unable to interact beyond reading the documented content.

When looking to define Web 2.0, there are many technical explanations around detailing this somewhat taboo era of the web. I will define it for you the way in which I have come to understand after sifting through the jargon filled explanations. Web 2.0 is an evolved and matured way in which the World Wide Web is conversing with its users. It flourishes on network communities who literally round up the troops and let the majority rule. I as the web user will choose what I want to read in the headlines, and decide who I allow to influence my thoughts, experiences and opinions. I decide when, where and how I want to receive and display this highly personalised content and I have the choice whether I contribute to this new collection of sharing or not.

From child to young adult Web 1.0 has matured and we find ourselves talking about a new generation of the World Wide Web with more depth, and meaning. Web 2.0 carries a new set of priorities, responsibilities and has been streamlined to provide a more collective experience for the user. Web 2.0 may be best understood by detailing the new personality or applications that it now provides. These new applications have one common factor; their purpose to bring the user into an interactive environment where the core activity is reliant on peer to peer (P2P) interaction. These applications are founded on hyperlinking and user generated content where the human user provides more accurate and relevant feedback based on their real life experience, making web 2.0 a user driven, intelligent web.

Blogs
A blog is a webpage where users document their opinions, personal experiences, diaries, interests and any other content they wish to express.
Blog entries or post’s are arranged chronologically displaying the most recent entry first and allow other users to comment on the material posted. These posts are usually tagged with certain keywords which then allow for subject matter to be to be categorised and filed into theme based menu systems.

Wikis
Wikis are web pages where users are able to edit, add and remove content and is very much a collaborative instrument facilitating group user work. Through simple hypertext style or hyperlinking between pages wikis are easy to navigate and content is simple to find.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking allows users to create lists of “favourites” or “bookmarks” to content they wish to view on a regular basis. Bookmarks are stored on a remote service and not on the user’s browser so encouraging social sharing in which other users using the remote service to bookmark their favourites are able to share common interests with one another. 

Tagging
Tags are keywords that are assigned to digital content such as websites, images and video clips. A tag is not a classification system but rather words and phrases used to describe the content. Tags are also used in bookmarking and in fact it is through tagging that users partaking in social bookmarking find common interest bookmarks.

Multimedia Sharing and Podcasting (Audio Blogging)
Multimedia sharing (video clips) and Podcasting (Audio clips) are means by which users can upload and share multimedia and audio content with other users. Users are able to upload and share any content they choose ranging from interviews, lectures, audio blogs, commercials and family videos.

RSS feeds (Real Simple Syndication)
RSS feeds enable users to easily find content updates on RSS-enabled sites. With RSS feeds, users don’t have to visit the site in order to access the new content. Through syndication and making use of a feed reader (aggregator), selected content is streamed to the feed which the user has subscribed to.

These are just a few of the applications that encompass Web 2.0 and it is clear that with user centric applications the web brings a new era of computing and networking. If you thought the world was small before, it just got even smaller. The “Global Village” we once knew has quickly become a “Global Suburbia” where users with common interests, goals and aspirations reside together creating mini communities within our virtual society. As taboo as the term Web 2.0 may be, the fact remains that this is the new way of the “World Wide Web” and as with all things in our lives that are fluid and changing, it’s up to you the user to go with the flow or swim against the tide, the beauty of Web 2.0 is that the choice is now yours.

Written by: Camilla Patten of bidorbuy. 

Search Engine and Social Media Optimisation a Reality!

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the latest buzz word amongst webmasters and marketers.  Everyone’s competing for that top spot on the search engine results page, but with so many racing to overtake the one in front of them, website owners are becoming desperate and are ‘clutching at straws’ to try to beat their competitors. 

We have barely digested the term SEO and already we’re hearing new jargon such as SMO (Social Media Optimisation) creeping in.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is simply a preview of things to come on the web. It’s already here and pioneering companies have already grasped the concept and are ensuring that their internet marketing strategy extends beyond traditional e-Marketing and into the area of Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Advertising and Social Media Optimisation.

Pioneering companies will win:

Sadly, few South African companies realise the significance of optimising their websites for top search engine rankings and social popularity.  There are many extraordinary looking websites being launched onto the Internet daily, yet their splashy entry pages and dazzling creative’s seldom does the company any good. These websites occupy space on the web; however they are by no means optimised to attract the correct target audiences. Few web designers are taught the skill of optimising the websites that they design for search engine rankings.  From the start of the web development project, companies should commission experienced search engine marketers or analysts to be involved in preparing the website brief for the developer by defining the essential elements that should be incorporated, if the website is to be positioned anywhere of significance on search engine results pages.

There are more than a hundred varying criteria that search engines include as part of their ranking algorithm. Website owners, web designers and marketers should take cognisance of the fact that it is simply not good enough to publish a fancy looking website onto the Internet and expect it to start attracting and converting customers in the hope of producing income from its online presence.  It takes skill and careful planning to create a website that will be recognised by search engines as relevant enough to rank in the top ten results, and then to take this one step further by ensuring that the user experience is one that will convert a researcher into a customer.  And remember the modern customer is one that is in control.

Today’s consumer is in control:

The new consumer is actively participating in social networks, they are bookmarking websites on social search engines and they are blogging about you. Ensure that your website is optimised to generate publicity through social media, online communities and social networks.  There are websites that consist of user generated ranking systems.  Make sure that your website can be bookmarked, linked to and tagged easily enough by the user.  Create a company blog or user community within your own website.  If you create something that allows your user to engage with you, and it is compelling enough for them to spread the word and to bookmark you then you are half way there.

You can’t fake it until you make it:

Getting ranked highly on search engine results is not a quick fix. It is a process that requires a great deal of planning, editing and monitoring in order to first climb into the top ranking positions and then to try to remain there.  With the algorithms changing at will, there is no one technique ‘cast in stone’ that will guarantee top rankings.  If you want to reap the rewards, you need to invest time and effort into properly researching your competitor’s position, and then carefully plan a strategy that will hopefully outrank them, while at the same time attracting the long tail. Beware of companies promising to have websites ranked in the top ten results pages within weeks.  Although some websites do rank much faster than others, those companies practicing spamming techniques may get websites ranking in a matter of weeks but, in return they can expect to be dropped from the rankings – or even worse, be blacklisted by the search engines within as little as six weeks.

Companies should be careful to approach search engine optimisation from an ethical – spam free – perspective if they want to thrive in this very competitive environment.  Until such time that a website ranks highly, there certainly is a place for paid advertising (pay-per-click).

Blue Magnet has launched a one day Search Engine Marketing training course that teaches the skill of Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation.  The courses are interactive and the content is easily understood by non-techies, marketers and web designers.

(c) Copyright Blue Magnet Web Intellect