Global Marketing Plus

Let me share with you the six methods that have been highly successful for me.

First, let me explain. This is a good question but one that is hard to answer. There is no answer that fits all businesses in all situations!

First of all, I am assuming that by “Free Advertising” you mean free of cost in money. As I mentioned in a previous blog, free or low cost marketing or advertising usually have a high cost in time and other resources. There is a trade off!

There are many variables that could change what marketing methods you use. Are you marketing a product or service? What product or service you are selling? Are you selling business-to-business or business-to-consumer. Are you trying to sell to a local, national or world-wide market? What fits your personality?

Remember also, that what worked last year may not work this year.

Also, who are your potential clients? If you are working with seniors, the Internet, including Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, may not be the best way to market to them. Whereas if your target market is in their 20′s, the Internet may be a viable way to contact them.

Another thing I have learned is that one marketing method almost always works better when combined with other marketing methods. For example, almost every method I have tried, either with my businesses or with client’s businesses, can double their effectiveness when combined with a website that is professionally built and looks professional and easy to navigate.

Over the past 13 years that I have been designing and building websites, I have constantly been doing market research, in some cases with focus groups with website visitors, to find out what items on a website help sales and what hurts sales. After this research, I have found that many websites have been built that actually handicap the business!

So, with that said, here are my top six marketing methods I have used over the past few years. I will briefly mention them in this post, but in future posts, I will spend much more time on how to perform each one in more detail.

1. Networking Meetings and Leads Groups. From personal experience, attending networking meetings and leads meetings work very well. I have also found that almost no matter what product or service you sell, you can benefit from networking groups.

My target market is business owners that are trying to increase sales. Most of the people who attend these kind of meetings are business owners trying to build their business. This is a very natural mix.

Your product does not have to be business related. If your target market is seniors that are ready for retirement centers, you will not find your target market at the meetings, but you might find someone who knows someone who has a relative that could use your services.

Most chamber of commerce host these networking meetings and many are free or just the cost of your lunch.

2. Blogging. Blogging must be done on a consistent basis. There have been times when I have been too busy doing other things I thought were more important, only to loose many of my readers and it was very hard to get them back.

I suggest a minimum of blogging once per week. But if you plan to post once a week, you MUST do it every week!

3. Online Directories. Online directories can bring in a lot of business, especially if you can find an industry specific directory.

Even though most directories may cost money, there are free ones out there. Also, those that charge, usually offer a basic listing for free.

4. Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, and others. These can be very effective. But be sure that you do not openly try to advertise. The reason being is if you are perceived as always “selling”, people will tend to tune you out.

5. Viral marketing. Viral Marketing is an idea that spreads–and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause.

I have used this since 1974, although before the term “viral marketing” came about I called it “Richocet Marketing“.

This could be a product in which a self-building cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them.

The product or service must be something that excites people enough to tell others about it, who then tell others, and so on. I will use other examples in future blogs.

6. Website and SEO. Even though websites and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are not free, there are some very inexpensive alternatives.

Statistics show that businesses that have an effective website and use it properly have a much higher success with the other four areas, above.

SEO is not paid advertisement or pay-per-click… that is Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO is getting your website a natural placement high on the search engines result page, (SERP).

SEO is one of those things you CANNOT search online and learn how to do it for yourself. Search engines are changing constantly and things that may have worked just a few weeks ago may get you banned from the search engines today!

But most small businesses cannot afford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars every month to get better rankings in the natural listing of the search engines.

That is why I have written SEO Master that does most of the work for a small business and explains in plain terms what must be done to your website to get those higher rankings.

And it only costs the same as a soda drink a day!

Remember, all these methods can take a lot of time, but little money. They also can work better when combined with other methods. In fact, I would suggest you use ALL 5 items above at the same time and cross market them!

Like I mentioned, I will spend time in future blogs to go in more details in each area plus other areas that did not make my top five areas.

Just as a follow up on Friday’s blog….

One of the big benefits I have found for having a blog is the new content added to your website on a regular basis.  If your blog is on another site (i.e. WordPress, etc), there will be no new content added to your site.

Because my blog is on my website (www.GlobalMarketingPlus.com/blog) Google visits my website more often because it sees new content added on a regular basis!

The biggest mistake I see website owners make is to use the free services to host your blog offered by many blog software companies.

The best way to get the full benefits of your blog is to include the blog on your own website!

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One of the biggest mistakes companies make when writing copy for a site is using industry terms that normal customers don’t think to use.

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Archeology, of course, is the systematic method to uncover artifacts from the past that have been buried or forgotten.

What archeologists do is examine artifacts that were lost and buried, and draw conclusions about how life was lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.

When people search online, it’s a lot like sifting through thousands of years of junk and broken pieces of pottery in order to find the one intact tablet that solves your mystery.

If you’re like me, you often see a lot of non-relevant results returned when you do a web search. Google, as good as it is, isn’t perfect. You scan down the page, looking for the answer to your question. And then you suddenly see a link to a site that matches exactly what you’re looking for.

Reverse archeology, applied to the Web, is a process that allows you to plant key information for people to find and discover.

How does the process of reverse archeology work? Essentially you come up with keywords that your target audience is likely to use in a keyword search, and then you create relevant content on your site. When prospective customers “digs” through the mass of web pages in a Web search, they can find your site quickly and easily.

Reverse archeology is a different type of mindset for generating website content, but one that can be extremely successful.

Next week, we’ll discuss a unique new way to optimize your site when you have visitors coming in from a search engine.

Google’s continuing mission is to deliver the best search results possible to its end users. So how can a search engine like Google differentiate between a company that is brand new (and might be a fly-by-night operation) versus an organization that has years of experience in the field? The answer: Google looks at the age of your domain name (along with several other varibles). If your domain name was registered last week, chances are good that your site won’t even appear in Google’s rankings for several months. (This is called the Google Sandbox.) But if your domain name was registered eight years ago, Google uses this information as a clue that you’ve been around for a little bit. In a nutshell, Google looks at the month and year when your domain was registered — and uses this to give more weight to companies that have been around for several years versus several weeks. Google also looks forward to see how long you have registered your domain; if you have registered your domain for five or ten years in the future, you’ve made a subtle, yet important economic decision that you’re still going to be around and in business in 2018. Here’s an instance where being frugal with domain name registration can actually hurt your rankings. That said, Google does place more weight on the past versus the future. So, what can you do to increase your rankings? First, make sure that your company’s domain name is registered for at least a few years from the present date. Second, make sure you know who is the contact person for your domain name. We’ve recently seen several instances where the person in charge of the domain name moves to a different organization, goes on vacation, or even passes away. And then, if the domain name comes up for renewal, it can be a mad scramble to keep your website and corporate email up and running.

If you’re not sure of the age of your domain name, please let me know, and I’d be happy to have our team take a quick look.

Thanks,
Ron

Even though search engines can’t read words inside graphics, they do use the name of the file and other contextual information to increase your rankings. One of the biggest missed opportunities is not naming images with search engine optimization in mind.

I can’t tell you how many times I see a site that has the logo named: logo.jpg

While that’s sufficient to display the logo in a browser, it’s much better to name the logo with descriptive keywords, such as: global-marketing-plus-logo.jpg (notice I seperated the words with an “-”.  This lets search engines read the words.  If I named the logo as: globalmarketingpluslogo.jpg, that is not a word and search engines will not recoginize it as a word).

If you want to further increase the relevancy, you can create a folder (also with keywords) that can help you increase keyword density on a page.

For example, placing an image in a directory like this will give you more relevancy than in a more non-descriptive folder:
/search-engine-optimization-services/seo-services-header-logo.jpg

Yes, it takes a little bit more time and effort for someone to type out a longer image name and keep it organized into different folders on your website.

But our research has found that increasing the relevant keywords in your images is a sure fire way to increase your search engine rankings.

Let me know if you need help with website development or email marketing.

Ron

Search engines love relevant text. They want to match the keywords that an end user types into a search engine with keywords that are located on your website.

Keyword density analysis is one of the most important ratios of how often these keywords appear on an individual webpage.

What is keyword density? It’s a percentage, calculated this way: Number of times keyword appears on a page / Total word count on page = Keyword Density Keyword density is usually displayed as a percentage.

So, if you have a page that has 100 words on it, and you have a keyword appear 5 times on the page, your page would have a keyword density of 5%. (5 / 100 = 5%)

In a real life example, the search term “website design” has an overall keyword density on this page of 4.13%:

Click the graphic above to see a live sample of a keyword page.

(10 instances of the keywords / 242 total words on the site = 4.13%)

However, not all keywords on a page are treated the same. Keywords in the title tags, page name and section headings are often given higher weight than keywords that appear in the regular content area of the page.

Here’s how the keywords break down in the different areas of the site:

So, how much keyword density is too much? It depends on which study you read, but it’s generally best to keep your keyword density between 3-6%. Anything more, and you’ll be penalized for trying to spam the search engines.

As a general rule of thumb, if the copy of the site makes sense to a human reading it, you should be fine. But if you repeat the same keyword five times in a row (Website Design, Website Design, Website Design, etc), then you can be banned from search engines or penalized.

Let me know if you’d like us to do a keyword density analysis on your site…

When websites were brand new, a sitemap was used to help people find their way around a disjointed site. As websites became easier to navigate, sitemaps fell out of favor.

But now they’re back… because they are the equivalent of baby food for search engines. Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this:

If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you haven’t done your job organizing your content and creating a   navigational system that is easy to understand.

But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It’s less about human visitors and more about search engines.

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your site, usually in a bulleted list.

Here’s an example of a sitemap:

As I’ve discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a website are often ’hidden’ behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from the home page).

A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your site in one convenient place.

When a search engine visits your site map, it’s very easy for them to then get a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your content in their system.

We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation of your site.

But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated.  Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site.

And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It’s a machine-readable version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site.

Click the graphic above to see a live sample of an XML sitemap.

Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and more rapidly than not using this method at all.

For my new sites, the XML sitemap allows the sites to be indexed in 3-4 days vs. the usual 3-4 months.

Let me know if you need help with a sitemap or XML sitemap for your site. We’re here to help.

We’ve discussed local search, and how to make sure you don’t confuse search engines with graphics and flash animation. We’ve also talked about the all-important title tags.

This week, we’ll take a higher-level view to discuss what search engines look for when ranking your site.

At the end of the day, a search engine is in business to help you find the most relevant results possible when you conduct a search. Search engines make their money by selling relevant advertising to supplement the natural, organic search results.

Because a top ranking in Google or another search engine can translate into a great deal of business, it’s important to know how search engines determine who gets placed at the top of the list.

The two biggest ways search engines rank you are based on: