internet marketing Archives | Page 2 of 6

7 ways to improve your Internet presence!

May 5, 2010 by Jim Connolly

Here are seven quick tips to help you improve your online presence.

If you have a section on your website or blog, called “news” either update it regularly or delete it. When someone clicks on that page and sees that the last entry was 6 months ago, it hardly makes you or your business look dynamic.
Write the copy (wording) of your site exclusively for your target prospective clients and no one else. If you are reading this, it’s almost certain that you are the owner of a business – that’s because you are the person I write for. Everything I do here, is designed for you. A message that is 100% relevant to a target group of people will generate massively better results, than a message that tries to be all things to all people. If you want to work with your ideal type of clients, write just for them and stop trying to please everyone.
If you ask people to comment on your blog or email you, you owe it to them to reply (if a reply is necessary.) I find it amazing that even the top social media gurus get this wrong. They ask for comments and then ignore 75% of them.
Look before you link! What do you think it says about you and your professionalism, if prospective clients visit your site and see that you link to sites that are unprofessional? The power of association is incredible. Show that you associate with great people and brands.
If you have a blog, it’s nice occasionally to tell your readers how great some other people or companies are. Don’t just talk about yourself. It shows confidence and class. BTW: Most of the people I tell my readers about on my blog are fellow marketing guys; my supposed competition. If they provide useful, valuable content, I want you to know about them!
On the subject of blogging, it’s not for everyone. I find it amazing when I hear social media gurus telling everyone to get a blog. Here’s the problem with that: Not everyone wants to write or enjoys writing. If you don’t like writing or find it hard to come up with interesting ideas – leave it! A poorly written blog that’s seldom updated, is not going to help you achieve anything.
If you make a claim on your site or social network, make sure you can back it up. My friend Irene Koehler from almostsavvy.com met the top tech journalist and blogger Robert Scoble at an event in San Francisco last year. She introduced herself to Robert, by saying that they had a mutual contact; Jim Connolly from the UK. Scoble smiled, said yes and asked her to say “hi” to me. Can you imagine how bad I would have looked, if I had told her we knew each other, and he told her that he’d never heard of me? If we make a claim about who we know or what we have achieved, it better be true; because it’s never been easier to bust a fake!

So, what tip or tips would you like to add to that list?

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Marketing: Make everything count!

March 19, 2010 by Jim Connolly

If you are serious about getting the maximum return from your sales and marketing efforts, this message is for you:

In marketing, nothing is neutral. Every marketing activity is either working for you or it’s working against you!

For example, look at Internet marketing. When I look at 99.9% of business websites or blogs, I can see immediately that they are not generating many sales, leads or enquiries. The owners of those sites wrongly assume that this is “just how it is.” They know that they need a site to help market their business, and wrongly assume that the results will come magically somewhere down the road. It doesn’t work like that.

Keep doing what you are doing and you will keep getting what you are getting!

If your site is NOT a lead / sales generating machine for your business, then it’s not a neutral marketing function. It’s working against you, by blocking all that business you should and could be winning. The same is true of every activity the typical small business invests time, money, energy or all three in; without the correct results.

Successful, growing businesses typically invest in between 10 and 12 marketing activities, which are deliberately designed to produce results. Their marketing is working for them.

However, we know that those businesses that just get by, invest in a few marketing activities, which they HOPE will start working one day. They get the occasional result, but typically find that they waste hours of their time and sometimes quite a lot of money too, on activities that under perform.

These are not neutral marketing activities. These activities are actively wasting the time and money of these businesses. Worse still, it’s totally avoidable!

Be sure to review your marketing activities and pay particular attention to anything, which you consider to be neutral; neither helping or hurting your business. If it’s neutral, that means it genuinely is NOT helping you and needs to be stopped and then either fixed, or replaced.

Remember: Keep doing what you are doing and you will keep getting what you are getting!

Blogging and critics

January 18, 2010 by Jim Connolly

How do you feel about people, who criticise you or your work negatively?

Well, if you are thinking of using a blog as a part of your marketing mix, (and you should), you will need to figure out how to deal with them. This is especially the case, if your blog becomes popular.

The 2 sides of blogging

There are 2 sides to blogging: The side the readers see and the side the blogger sees. Readers only see the published comments and the blog posts. The blogger sees everything. We see the spam and in some cases, the abusive emails too.

I generally just get smartasses telling me about typos – I call them The Typo Police! These people love passing on negative criticism, but they are harmless.

Naturally, as a blogger’s success increases, so does his or her reach. In reaching more people, you become a target for those who are either envious, bored or usually both.

For instance, when I started this blog, I used to get around 10 emails a week from people, asking me general marketing questions or enquiring about my services. Today that’s around 70/80 emails every day and often over 100! Just 2 or 3 emails a month are abusive and I hardly ever get any kind of abusive blog comments here. I’m very fortunate to have attracted the right crowd; people who will debate and critique, but without the abuse.

Compare this to what famous people get!

For example, last year I found myself exchanging emails with the massively talented IT Journalist, broadcaster and American TV personality, Natali Del Conte. Natali had been mentioned in a post I wrote and received some totally uncalled for criticism via the comments section of that blog.

Some of the comments were really abusive and insulting. Natali’s only crime was to be both talented and beautiful (how dare she). Sadly, when you mix the kind of success Natali has earned, with envy and (the supposed) anonymity of the Internet, some people will say things that they would never say to your face.

With increased visibility, comes increased exposure to the good and the bad – the positive and the negative. I believe you need to develop a broad pair of shoulders, if you want to develop a high profile blog or business.

Why Google means so little to me (and you mean so much!)

December 4, 2009 by Jim Connolly

One of the first rules of business is not to rely too heavily on any 1 client or customer, for the majority of your income. If you do, and that customer goes broke or takes their business elsewhere, you’re in BIG trouble! Even if that customer just decides to pay you late, it can kill your cash flow or put you out of business.

Everyone knows that it’s far better and a lot less risky, to have a wider spread of business.

Or do they?

For some reason, when it comes to the Internet, it seems many site owners and bloggers focus the majority of their efforts on just one form of traffic development; search engines. Then, the vast majority of that is focused on just 1 search engine – Google. As a result, some people are now very dependent on Google traffic. Many invest a staggering amount of time and effort doing everything they can, to keep Google happy.

Even the most read sites on the Internet can become extremely dependent on Google. In a recent blog post, Darren Rowse from problogger explained that he almost went out of business, when Google decided overnight, to cut his traffic (and thus his sales/leads) by 30%!

I believe it’s insane to allow any 3rd party to have that much control over:

Your sales
Your leads
Your enquiries
Your income
and maybe even your business’ future

Whilst I recommend that every business invests in professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I ALSO strongly suggest that you consider investing in alternatives too. Why? Because the results can be amazing AND it removes your exclusive reliance on search engines.

For example, although this blog is currently ranked one of the top 100 marketing blogs in the world by Adage, just a small percentage of my traffic comes via search engines. The vast majority comes from people, via social media (more on that in a moment.)

SEO, social media and your Internet marketing mix

When I started this blog, I decided that Google was NOT going to play any deliberate part in the blog’s development. I do NOT recommend others follow this path, it’s not the right move for the vast majority of people.

Why did I do it? Because as someone from a traditional marketing background, I wanted to use a form of marketing for the blog, which was not so reliant on Google. I elected to use a strategy, which used a number of social media related activities. The idea was (and still is) to provide my blog with a much wider spread of human-powered, marketing options.

I use some basic SEO here, like tagging posts so that it’s easier for search engines to correctly identify what my posts are about. This takes seconds to do. However, I do not deliberately use Google friendly key phrases or key words – I don’t even have a sitemap! I also do zero off-site SEO. If Google stopped sending people here tomorrow, it would have very little impact on the development of this blog. Chris Brogan claims to have gone 1 step further than me, and says he does no SEO on his blog whatsoever! That’s incorrect, as his theme is optimized and he has requested people to link to him – I think he means he doesn’t keyword stuff. Ignoring SEO completely is at best, a little blinkered.

Here are just some of the ways that people, via social media, have helped me generate targeted traffic to this blog:

People share my blog posts on Twitter. I use Twitter most days and have connected with a some great people. Some of them are kind enough to share posts on Twitter, if they find them interesting.
People use sites like Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg etc to share blog posts. For example, this 1 post gets hundreds of views every week from Stumbleupon users.
Fellow bloggers link to posts here, which alerts their readers to this blog. Some bloggers link to the entire blog.
People have mentioned the blog in podcasts.
I link to this blog in my marketing newsletter; which helps new newsletter readers discover the blog.

Because SEO is very much the secondary focus of the blog’s development, I focus on optimising my posts, so that they are as attractive as possible for people. I have to admit that as a writer, I find it far, far more natural to write for people, than to alter my writing style, so that there are key phrases and words scattered strategically – to attract Google’s attention too.

It’s wise to combine great copy writing with powerful SEO. Particularly when writing copy for a website, as opposed to a blog, the combined SEO social media approach is extremely valuable.

Love SEO – but give social media a hug too!

Do not misread this post and think for one moment that I am suggesting you ignore SEO. That would be wrong. I am not saying that at all. However, I AM saying that all site owners and bloggers should spend some time exploring additional ways to generate targeted traffic. Keep up with your SEO, but seriously consider adding a little people-power to your Internet marketing mix!

Successful blog marketing – 3 things to consider!

November 25, 2009 by Jim Connolly

Here’s a quick example of the kind of results that can be achieved with a well-marketed blog. If you are either thinking of starting a blog or you already have one, but wonder if it’s worth marketing it more effectively, you will find this extremely useful. It’s based on 3 key areas you need to consider – But first, here’s why I decided to write this post for you today.

I had the pleasure of speaking with one of my long term readers for the very first time yesterday. The guy’s name is Brent Pohlman and Brent’s the Marketing Director at Midwest Laboratories in Omaha, Nebraska. During our call, Brent mentioned how he attended a morning meeting that day, for local businesspeople in his part of Omaha.

During the meeting, Brent told the group that he was going to be speaking with Jim Connolly later in the morning. When he said this, one of the businesspeople there asked;
“Isn’t he that bald marketing guy from the UK?”

Ohama, Nebraska is located in the beautiful Mid West of the United States; 6 time zones away from the small village here in the UK, where I live and work. Even so, through the effective marketing of this blog, people were already aware of what my name was, who I was and what I did. What makes that name / brand awareness even more amazing, is that the people attending that meeting were marketing people and business owners; the exact people my work is aimed at. For those of you, who don’t know, I help market small businesses all over the world.

Now, I have no idea how many millions it would have cost me, to generate that kind of targeted, international name awareness via old-school, paid advertising. However, I do know what it cost in order to achieve this using the blog.

There are 3 investments you need to consider:

Blog marketing – The FINANCIAL investment

I use a premium WordPress theme for this blog (it’s called Headway and I love it so much I am an affiliate.) This theme allows me to make all changes to the blog myself and have it look exactly how I want it to, with the functionality I need, without requiring a web designer or CSS expert.

Then, there’s the financial investment for hosting this blog. However, as I already host 2 other sites with my server people, this one actually costs me nothing. I recommend to everyone that they get the best hosting they can afford – not the ‘cheapest.’ When it comes to hosting a site, avoid the bargain bucket providers.

Blog marketing – The TIME investment

The biggest investment required for successful blog-based marketing is time. For example, there’s the time it takes to write the kind of compelling copy (articles/posts) that people will value and want to share. Like many successful blogs, this one doesn’t grow its readership thanks to Google; it relies on people sharing what they find here with their friends and contacts. That means the information here needs to be good enough to regularly motivate people to want to share it with their friends on social networking sites, bookmarking sites and via their blogs.

Another time investment that I believe is essential for marketing your blog, is to read other people’s blogs. I read around 10 marketing-related blogs every day and about 50 others semi regularly. This is a great way to keep abreast of what people in your industry and marketplace are talking about.

There’s also the time it takes to interact with the people who comment on your blog, and those, who share your content. If someone comments here, I always try and find the time to thank them. I do this either on the blog or, if they use Twitter, I will often thank them on Twitter – sometimes both. There are a few posts here with over 200 comments and one with close to 700 comments, which were impossible to keep up with, but I do regularly connect with everyone who comments here. The people who comment on this blog and those, who share my content, are of FAR more value to me, than the blog itself. I can start a new blog tomorrow, but those relationships are pure gold dust!

Blog marketing – The expertise investment

The final investment you will need to consider, is the investment in expertise. You will either need to invest in learning how to produce inspirational, compelling posts and market them, or you will need to buy that expertise in. This could have been placed in the time investment or financial investment section – but it’s so important (and neglected) that I wanted to give it special attention.

You see, some of the most interesting blogs out there are among the least read! The thing is, from a marketing perspective, having a ton of great content on your blog is of little real value, if your prospective clients aren’t aware of it.

You must find out how to create content that will motivate people to; call you, buy from you, visit you, email you, subscribe to your mailing list, etc. You need to know how to inspire people to want to share your content. You need to find out how to build an active community of people around your blog. You need to know how to make people feel great about you and your business / brand. This requires considerable expertise.

In my experience, most business bloggers decide not to invest in at least 1 of those 3 key areas. If there’s any 1 area listed above that you are neglecting right now, I strongly recommend you give it the investment it deserves. Your business will thank you!

Marketing and blogs