Archive for blogging
Keep Offering Freebies – Part 1
Posted 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
Start a Blog – Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsI recently published an article on numerous Internet sites that I called the Seven Step Online Marketing Strategies Plan. In that article I detailed seven steps that should be included in when you are developing your own online marketing strategies. The first step is to start a blog. Why a blog? There are a lot of different reasons, but the biggest reason is that a blog usually provides more fresh and up to date information than a typical website. For many people, establishing their current website was a big deal that involved a lot of money and time and often required the services of a website development company. Once the website was set up, it was pretty much left alone and quickly became out dated.
With the arrival of some amazing blog software, all that has changed. It is now much less expensive to develop an Internet presence, and blogs can be set up to look like virtually any website you could imagine. The difference is that a blog is much easier to set up and maintain than the traditional website. Also, because the blogs are easier to work with, they tend to get updated more and are often ranked higher than sites that have not been updated. One of the first things I often do with my own online marketing clients is to change their existing websites into a blog environment.
There are many options for starting a blog on the Internet. There are some excellent free options like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. These are easy to use and most people should be able to go to either one of those options and have a blog up and running in less than hour. For most businesses, however, I recommend using WordPress.org in a self hosted environment. The WordPress software is free, but hosting a site and getting a domain name will cost around $60/year. I will be writing about getting a WordPress blog set up and hosted in future articles.
Until next time….
Steve
Online Marketing Strategies – The Story Part 7
Posted by: | CommentsIt has been over a week since I last updated the progress of the Online Marketing Strategies blog. The site has been public for about three weeks. I have distributed three articles on Article Marketer linking back to this site, and have been doing some commenting on other blogs in this niche. I have also added some footer links on some of the sites in my network pointing back to this site. Since our last update we have had four interesting developments.
First, we have had a nice increase in links.
The Yahoo linkdomain command tells us we now have 1432 links. One of the things about link building is that you don’t want to go to fast. We are probably right on the edge of developing the links too quickly, but we have only used solid white hat techniques to develop them.
Second, the Online Marketing Strategies site spent most of last week on page 4 in position 32, but it has retreated back to page 14 now in position 138.
We are also showing up on page 4 in Yahoo. All in all, very reasonable for a three week old site. It is quite normal to see a new site move all over the place on the search engine results. We could still end up in the sand box at this stage of the game as well.
Third, the Online Marketing Strategies site just got some Google Toolbar PageRank. It is a PR 1, but that is better that a PR 0.
Fourth, the site is getting some steady traffic from the articles we published. Nothing earth shattering, but five or ten visitors a day.
I am going to continue to slowly apply good SEO techniques and attempt to get the site up on Page 1 of all the search engines that I can. In the mean time, I will be working with some interesting new clients and seeing how I can put this network to work for them.
Until next time….
Steve
