Archive for develop
How to Develop Online Marketing Strategies
Posted by: | CommentsI recently took on an Online Marketing Strategies project for a company that builds turn key fish farms. This company has been one of the pioneers in patenting and producing efficient aquaculture tanks and diffusers and also building and developing fish farms all over the world. Since they have been extremely busy over the years, they had neglected their Internet presence and their existing website, which had been put on line in 2001, was in really bad shape. The existing, very old website, did not respond to any keyword searched that would have any practical application in today’s market. So, the question became, what online marketing strategies could we use to provide an effective Internet presence.
We started out by doing some extensive keyword research. We were looking for keywords that would generate some traffic, and also be within our reach in a short period of time. All of the major keyword phrases encompassing fish farms and fish farming are highly competitive and already well represented by websites with high page ranks. We eventually settled on a keyword phrase that received about 1000 exact requests on Google every month and that we believed we could compete in within a few months of getting started. The keyword phrase we selected was Aquaculture Tanks.
Our next step was to purchase a suitable domain name and we found the www.aquaculturetanks.net was avaialble, so we purchased it. We then hosted the website (we used Good News Domains for both purchasing the domain name and hosting) and installed WordPress. Since the old website would not be helpful in our online marketing strategies, we simply pointed the old domain name (in case people still used it from old literature, etc.) at the new site.
We added a theme that would allow us to build an attractive site and provide information about aquaculture farming and the services our client can provide. The theme that we are using is in effect a blog, but we set up the blog with a static front page which gives it the appearance of a more traditional website. Here is a look at the final product:
Now we are working on getting the site some traffic. Our initial effort is to get the site showing up well for aquaculture tanks. Then we will begin to go after some of the more competitive fish farming keywords. The site is about one month old now and we are currently generating a position 5 page 1 result on Google.
We are also receiving a page 1 position 1 result on Yahoo:
These are good results for a new site and are already generating some traffic. Our next steps will include article marketing and link building to really begin the traffic generation. I will give you updates about this project in the future.
Until next time….
Steve
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
