Online Marketing Strategies

How to Develop Online Marketing Strategies

Steve — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:49:04 +0000

I 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

Out of the Sand Box – The Online Marketing Strategies Story Continues

Steve — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:03:36 +0000

And just as suddenly as we went into the sand box, Online Marketing Strategies has come back out. We were in the sand box for about three weeks. That really isn’t very long. I have had sites that were in the sand box for months. When the Online Marketing Strategies site went into the sand box, we were showing up at the bottom of page one or the top of page two. Now we are back in the middle of page three. While we were in the sand box, we weren’t in the top one thousand results.

Now I will start to blog more consistently and see if we can get the site back on page one of a Google search for Online Marketing Strategies. Interestingly, this site is has been showing up consistently on page one of Yahoo, but Yahoo doesn’t produce the traffic that Google does.

I have been busy working on sites for several new clients. I will be writing about them in future articles. I have also been busy trying out different online chat programs to see which ones I can recommend to our clients who want to offer live online customer service. I also spent some time recently doing some shopping cart research. There are a lot of shopping carts available, but I have been working with a couple of shopping carts that are available for free as WordPress plugins. I will be writing articles about the online chat software and the shopping cart programs in future articles here on Online Marketing Strategies.

Until next time….

Steve

Into the Sand Box – The Online Marketing Strategies Story Continues

Steve — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:24:08 +0000

I think my title is probably too long for this article, but its OK, because not many people will ever see it. Why? Because like many new sites, this Online Marketing Strategies site has been told it can’t play with the older more established sites for a while and has been sent to the Sand Box. It is not an uncommon occurrence and the site will emerge from the Sand Box at some point in the future. Sometimes it’s a few weeks, sometimes its a few months, but it will come out and be allowed to associate with the other sites again. Before the site went to the Sand Box it was showing up pretty regularly on page 1 of a Google search for Online Marketing Strategies, so my hope is that when it comes out of the Sand Box it will move back quickly to page 1.

What do you do when your site is in the Sand Box? The same thing you always do. You post new content, you work on your links, you do some article marketing, and you wait. Fortunately, I have three new clients that I am building websites for and helping with a variety of different Online Marketing Strategies. These new clients will keep me busy for the next few months and hopefully by then this site will be allowed out of the Sand Box. The time will also allow me to finish the core articles for the site that I am developing to help people develop their own Internet Marketing plans.

Until next time….

Steve

Keep Offering Freebies – Part 1

Steve — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:08:28 +0000

Another 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

Steve — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:14:06 +0000

I 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

Steve — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:27:29 +0000

If 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

Start a Blog – Part 1

Steve — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:56:43 +0000

I 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 Plan

Steve — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:19:47 +0000

I wrote an article recently that outlined seven steps to use in developing online marketing strategies. This article has been published on a lot of websites and as people come to this Online Marketing Strategies site to follow up, I wanted to add a series of articles to broaden the outline. To facilitate this process I have added each of the seven steps as a category on the right sidebar of the site and the majority of articles I write over the next couple of months will be all about further developing the thoughts of the original outline.

Online Marketing Strategies

I will be writing in detail about different ways to start a blog. There are free services that can be used, but ultimately I recommend setting up a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. I will then begin to talk about the beginning and intermediate aspects of good solid search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. I have already written on this site about article marketing but I will develop that further as well.

Further developing the outline I will write about the importance of interacting with people that visit your blogs and websites. Answering their questions and comments and visiting their sites are an important part of online marketing strategies. As your sites grow and you develop a base of solid content to share, it is important to encourage people to sign up for your RSS and email subscriptions. I will write about some ways to move this part of the process along. Once you have developed a good list from your email and RSS subscriptions, you can use the list to start effective email campaigns to promote selected products or services that you think will benefit your readers. I will also write about the importance of offering people good “freebies” that will be of some benefit to your readers.

Until then….

Steve

Online Marketing Strategies – The Story Part 8

Steve — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:03:50 +0000

We have reached the end of the first month of this Online Marketing Strategies site going public. I thought it would be fitting to publish the most recent stats on where the site is on its one month birthday. Let’s start with our search engine results. Today on Google we are actually on page 2 of a keyword search for Online Marketing Strategies in position 12.

This is most likely a little new site bounce and I would expect the site to beat a retreat and maybe even do a little sand box time in the moths ahead. In the meantime, we are happy to have moved from no where to page 2 in the first month on a competitive keyword phrase. We are also on page 2 of Yahoo in position 18.

For the month of June we are currently showing 1088 links by using the Yahoo linkdomain command.

We are also starting to get a little traffic over the last couple of weeks. Here is what our stats look like.

We had 47 unique visitors over the last two weeks of June on Online Marketing Strategies, 12 of which returned to the site at least once.

In July we will continue the process of building good solid links to the site. I will also do a little more article marketing to not only build links but also get some new visitors to the site. I am going to begin writing more articles about the process on developing Online Marketing Strategies for this site as well. All in all this was a very good opening month!

Until next time….

Steve

My IPhone is Almost Perfect

Steve — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:48:36 +0000

I finally caved in and bought an IPhone a couple of weeks ago. I waited until the technology changed, and bought a refurb of the older model for $79. Over the past couple of years I had been using a variety of very cheap and just barely functional phones. At one time I had a TREO which was nice, but I really didn’t use many of the features and I was always jealous when I watched what Jack Bauer could do with his on 24. The other problem I was having with the phones is that the letters and numbers were getting smaller and smaller and I always had trouble hearing what people were saying (most of this is because I don’t see or hear as well as I used to).

So, I justified the new phone because I thought there would be some applications that I could use in developing online marketing strategies. I have to say, that the IPhone is really quite amazing. I can hear it very well, and I can see all the numbers and letters. I would like to say that the IPhone was perfect but I can’t. In the first week I had it I discovered a serious problem with the IPhone. If someone calls you while you are eating chicken wings, there is absolutely no way to answer the phone. Other than that small glitch, I am extremely happy with the purchase.

I am watching the commercials for the new (S) model, but I am confident I can wait for that phone until the next one comes out. The other thing I really liked, was that there was no instruction manual. Now I don’t have to feel guilty for not reading through the manual to see how everything works. I am confident that I will never use the phone to its full potential and I am OK with that. I do hope that future models will address the chicken wing issue. There should be an APP for that!

Until next time on Online Marketing Strategies….

Steve