Keep Offering Freebies – Part 1
By · CommentsAnother big part of your online marketing strategies needs to include giving stuff away. The Internet provides an amazing marketing opportunity that is quite different from traditional marketing. This is clearly demonstrated in the idea of giving stuff away free. For example, walk through most mall food courts and you can probably score a few free samples of “orange chicken” on a toothpick. The restaurant is offering you a small sample with the hopes that you will buy a meal. By percentage, perhaps they are giving away 1 or 2 percent of their product to increase sales. On the Internet, it is often necessary to give away a large percentage of what you offer, in order to sell your services.
Let me use this Online Marketing Strategies site as an example. My ultimate goal with this site, is to use it as a vehicle to attract clients that I can sell my website development and online consulting services to. In an effort to do this, I will write articles that tell people how to do just about everything I know how to do. This information that I pass on, which took me a long time and a lot of money and effort to develop and refine, is my product. I will give away 95 % of it in the hopes of converting that last five percent into new clients. So, my first freebie on this site is information on how to start blogs and how SEO works etc.
I have already started my second freebie, which is the free ten minute skype consultation that I offer to anyone who wants to ask about online marketing strategies or get help with a blog or SEO issue. I have found that I can answer a lot of questions in that ten minute conversation. My ultimate hope, however, is that some of these people will eventually hire me at my regular consulting rate. As this site develops and grows I will keep offering good freebies along the way to help people who come regularly to the site. You need to consider what you can begin to offer to the readers of your blog or website if you aren’t already doing so.
Until next time….
Steve
Search Engine Optimization – Part 2
By · CommentsI am going to pick up the thread from Part 1 in this series about the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. At the end of the previous article we had typed in our keyword phrase, successful online business, and now we need to dig into the results. The first thing that I want to do is to adjust the tool to get more helpful results.
There is a drop down option about half way down on the right side of the page that says Match Type. Go ahead and change that to Exact. This will give you a more accurate number of the actual monthly searches for your keyword phrase. You can see that the exact match reduced our number down to 720.
Now what we need to do is change some options so that we can tell what we are looking at. Go the Choose columns to display drop down and do the following:
Show Estimated Avg. CPC
Hide Advertiser Competition
Hide Local Search Volume
What you should end up with is the following information:
This tells us that our keyword phrase is searched for 720 times a month globally. Currently, people are bidding 2.69 to advertise for that phrase. If you were using keywords to develop an income from Google, this information would be what you would need to know to see if it would be worthwhile to develop a site or a page that would respond to the search engines for the keyword. In this case, if I was able to get ranked in the top spot for this keyword. I would get some portion of the 720 monthly searches. Probably around 300 visitors a month. A normal percentage of people who actually click on ad is about 2.5 %. So I would get about 7 or 8 clicks. I wouldn’t get all of the $2.69 each time either. Google takes a cut. I would probably get about .75 (seventy-five cents) per click. Every month I would make about five or six dollars. That makes this a terrible keyword for Adsense. However, since I am only developing the phrase as an experiment I will continue to use it and see what I can do.
The next thing I need to do is see what the competition looks like. Go to the Google Search bar and type in the keyword phrase there.
The results of our search look like this:
Now I check the toolbar page rank for each of the sites in the top five positions. If any of them are a 4 or greater, I usually find a different keyword. It will take to much work and time to crack the top five. In this case, everything in the top 5 has a toolbar page rank of 2 or less. I will continue on with this keyword so that you can see the process from here.
Until next time….
Steve
Search Engine Optimization – Part 1
By · CommentsIf you have spent any time working with websites, you have probably heard about search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a big topic all over the Internet, and by doing a little research, you can find pretty much all of the tips and tricks that are used by SEO experts for free. The main goal of SEO is to get your site to show up on the search engines in the best possible position. Most of the search engine traffic goes to the first five results that are given for a keyword search. Having your site show up on page one for a keyword phrase that is searched for often will guarantee you a steady flow of traffic on your site. The more traffic you have, the more successful your website will be. That is why search engine optimization is an important part of most online marketing strategies.
There are a lot of parts to SEO that include techniques for writing articles with good keyword content, and optimizing your blog to interact well with the search engines. Another part of the process is determining what keyword phrases we can use to help capture some of that search engine traffic. For this site, my main keyword phrase is online marketing strategies. My hope is that when people search for online marketing strategies that this site will eventually show up on page one in the top five. As I work toward that goal, I need to find other keyword phrases that will complement my main keyword phrase and help increase the number of visitors to the site. I will take you through a quick process for determining good keyword phrases.
For this process we are going to use a free tool from Google called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can access this handy keyword tool at
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This Keyword tool is actually designed for people who are going to use adwords as part of their online marketing strategies, but we are going to use the tool to help us get an idea of how much traffic a keyword phrase receives. Here is what you will see when you first access the Google keyword tool:
Type in any keyword phrase you want to search for and fill in the captcha and press the Get Keyword ideas button. I used the keyword phrase successful online business. Google will then provide you with the following results:
In Part 2 of this article I will explain how we can adapt this information to help us figure out how well the keyword phrase will do.
Until then….
Steve
