Marketing Science Blog

The Internet is now a full-blown medium for product and service advertisements.  Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements has ventured into placing ads on the Internet.

But with millions of websites being visited by millions of surfers, how can you make sure your ad will be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users?  Here are a few tips.

1.  Place an ad on the websites frequented by your target customers.  Before doing this, you need to define who your target customers are.  Placing an ad on sites they frequent increases the possibility that your ad will gain the attention and will be followed your target customers.

Also, consider the website’s search engine placement, traffic, external linking and the other ads placed on it.  External linking will determine if there are other sites that link to this site.  This will mean that people can get to the site where your ad is placed, even if they are browsing a different site.  Check if any of your competitors have ads on the site.

2.  Placing ads on some sites cost some money.  However, there are also sites that can place a link to your site, product or service in exchange of having their link being displayed on your site.  This is also true about the newsletters sent by site owners to its mailing list members regularly.

Also, having helpful links placed on your site and having sites link to your pages help in boosting search engine ranking.  This is similar to making a statement that your site’s content is important that other sites have links to your web pages.

3.  Pay per click (PPC) is a good lead generation method in Internet marketing.  You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked.  If you prefer this method of advertising, make sure you’re using services that set limits on daily expenses.  There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor your PPC results.

4.  Choose your domain name wisely.  It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement.  Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.

5.  Make sure you have useful content on your sites.  While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site.  It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines.  So make sure that keywords are used strategically.

6.  When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers.  What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site?  Also, use specific keywords or key phrases.  Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.

7.  Track your ads.  Always check how much you have spent on placing links on frequently visited sites and on PPC.  There are services that allow you to monitor PPC transactions and how many of these end in sales.  You always need to consider if the ads that you have placed on these websites are getting you to your target consumers and if these ads can lead to revenue.

One final tip on marketing products and services, sell the benefits.  This is absolutely critical.

It will boost p your marketing tremendously if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product features or product specifications.  These things may not mean much to customers, unless they know what the the benefit is (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).

Getting to the top of search engine results can be difficult since millions of websites exist, many of which are using the same keywords you’re using.

While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to be placed under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results.  Strategic advertising and linking, together with useful content, can also get you to the top of the search results.

By being mindful of these 7 tips, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your strategic Internet marketing goals (translation: You’ll be making more sales & profits!)

Posted by Bob

I’m a big fan of Joe Vitale. I’ve been through his motivational and success consciousness program, The Key. It’s helped me immensely along with other self help courses.

Joe had a great post today about attracting more money into your life. I encourage you to check it out.

7 Ways To Attract More Money

Ok, so everybody and their brother is handing out marketing advice for 2008. I would like to provide my own list of things to recommend based on my own experiences as well as some of the things I’ve learned myself recently from my own research and from Alex Mandossian’s training.

#1 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Start a Blog and Post Regularly

A blog (web log) is a great way to add interesting and valuable content to your website without the usual formalities and pressures of writing, refining and publishing articles.

It’s just a lot easier to write when you’re being informal. You don’t have to creatively spit out paragraph after paragraph or obsess over grammar and style. After all, it’s YOUR blog. You write as little or as much as you want.

The marketing benefit of blogging is enormous. Search engines look favorably on blogs (over websites) because the content is usually updated regularly.

Some blogging tips… Try to update your blog at least every 2-3 days. Even better if you can update daily. The search engines will give preference to blogs that update frequently.

For great free blogging software, just click the WordPress link at the bottom of this page. Have your webmaster install it, configure it and you can start blogging right away!

#2 Marketing Strategy for 2008: SEO Search Engine Optimization

I am amazed at the large number of business websites which have poor (or no) search engine optimization. I believe part of this problem comes from the fact that many businesses have relied heavily on pay per click advertising as a quick fix to their search engine traffic woes.

As a result SEO gets passed over or a belief develops within the company that SEO is only for big companies with deep pockets. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a modest investment of say $75 -100 per page most small or medium businesses can enjoy a nice return on investment.

For example, I recently built a new website for one of my home care clients. I optimized it for mostly local search traffic using long tail keywords and many keywords which don’t even appear in the keyword inventories of search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

This may seem somewhat contrarian to the normal keyword research a company or SEO consultant might recommend i.e. “only select and use keywords you find from the keyword tools of search engines”.

But my clients are benefiting from good traffic to their local businesses with these “invisible” keywords. In order to find these keywords you have to work closely with your clients and their prospects to figure out what’s most important to them and what’s “top of mind” when they do a search. Often times they use phrases which aren’t popular enough to be listed by the keyword tools. They add a town name or a city to a phrase for example. When taken collectively, all these invisible keywords can bring substantial traffic to a website.

If you do anything this year to improve your website traffic, have your site optimized and try to update your content regularly.

#3 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Video Content on Blogs and Websites

As most people have already figured out, video is “white hot” on the Internet right now. And there’s no end in sight. What’s especially great about this is the fact that search engines are currently giving priority to sites which contain video. Even more priority if you update with new video regularly.

In fact I believe this is NOT a fad, but web videos are here to stay. A lot like reality TV, video captures and commands people’s imagination and attention. It’s addictive. We are all voyeurs to some degree and video plays on this natural human characteristic.

Admittedly, I’ve been behind the web video curve, but no more. I went out and purchased a Flip Video camera that will create high resolution “how to” videos that I can place in my blogs and websites.

So my recommendation to anyone reading this post, is to just get started with video. You don’t need an expensive video camera, you can pick up a decent DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for as little as $100. Once you’ve done that, start creating some video tutorials or “how to” videos for your area of expertise.

Not only will these videos showcase your talents, they can create a “viral video effect” if you are providing something of real value and give people the opportunity to share the videos with friends at social bookmarking (like Digg, Stumble Upon) and networking sites (like FaceBook and MySpace) or by using a good TAF (Tell a Friend) script. If done correctly, the results could be a flood of new traffic coming to your site on a regular basis.

Part II in tomorrow’s post.

-Bob

I am feeling very guilty since I have not been posting lately in the marketing blog since I started my taxes. But the good news is that my taxes are done.

I’ve been very productive with some much needed website changes too. I’ll write up a separate post to outline the major (and not so major) changes I am implementing for 2008 and the impact it should have moving forward.

I’m very excited about the rest of the year ahead as January and February have been highly productive overall, with both work and continuing education.

-Bob