Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

Key ideas on Business Development from Michelle Dale, at VMF!

1. Do You Think You Are Proud or Stubborn?

As I am a real Taurean, I know that I have a big tendency to be stubborn. This resulted in me leaving school at the young age of 16 and moving away from home, even though people told me that I wouldn’t be able to look after myself being so young and that I wouldn’t be able to make a go of it in the world as I had quit on my education and so this just made me more determined to prove myself and show them how wrong they were. I also have a huge amount of pride in me (Yes, that’s my sin), my pride is responsible for the part of me that keeps me going, no matter what – if I say I am going to do something – I do it.

When I told everyone in my life I was going to move to Egypt and start a business, then hell, I was going to move to Egypt and start a business, and that was that.

If you have a “Failure is not an option” attitude, then you have a good chance of succeeding.

2. How Would You Describe Your Work Ethic?

The Internet now is riddled with home-based business opportunities — work 10 minutes a day and earn $4000 a week, or buy my instant cash cow product and you’ll be driving a Ferrari by the end of next month. If you read between the lines you will see that many of these people who are touting these schemes are actually struggling for money themselves, have no idea how it all works, or whatever they are trying to sell you and are simply catering to the dream that many of us have to grab a lot of money; remember that Virtual Assistance may well be a home-based business and might well allow you to change your life so much that you can travel and be quite successful, together with a nice sized income on a monthly basis, but you have to realise that it is NOT the type of business where you can work a little and play a lot. And to take advantage of this quickly, seriously consider taking on someone looking into virtual assistant training, or even a team of virtual assistants, to maximise your efforts in a very small period of time.

If you’re one of these people who still believes that “you only get out what you put in,” then you have the perfect work ethic to be a fantastic Virtual Assistant. Don’t forget, someone looking into virtual assistance can help you with all the details, at a great price, simply because they’re still “learning the ropes.”

Hard work has always paid off for me, and still does. My great motivator is the fact that I absolutely love what I do and I’m proud of the business that I created and so if you really focus on looking after your business with tender care, it will repay you in spades.

#3 – Are You Excited – Insanely Excited?

Are you totally ‘IN LOVE’ with the idea of becoming a Virtual Assistant, do you marvel at the doors that could open up to you, and the change in lifestyle which could literally be around the corner?

The idea of what being a Virtual Assistant can mean for you should make you very excited indeed, truly motivated, ready to do what it takes, under any circumstances. This amount of motivation is very important and will certainly be enough to get you going, but you will need a lot more of this excitement if you are going to elevate yourself to the very top.

Always focus on this excitement and remember that you have to STAY motivated in this way, even when the chips are down as they will be from time to time, because this excitement is what will ultimately keep you going forward… I have a FREE gift for you to help you on the path of sticking to your Virtual Assistant Business — no matter what, and you can download this absolutely free gift, right here: Thirty Seven.

The second most frequent suggestion made by search engine optimisation commentators (after “make use of social media) still seems to be “write a blog”. It would be reasonable for the proprietor of an organisation to question this, as its usefulness in enhancing the search engine positioning of your pages is not immediately apparent.

The expert search optimization agency engaged by an organisation will be producing promotional abstracts to be dispersed on reliable blogs that are intended to increase the natural search engine positioning of the pages of the website that the abstracts are intended to publicise. The abstracts will probably not mention the business directly by name, but they will include anchor text and backlinks to the website pages using the keywords selected to make those connections to the website. A similar method is even being used by some newspapers to connect to paid advertising from news stories that just happen to include a word that relates to the advert but may have no relevance to the news item at all: the anchor text in search optimization abstracts does have relevance to the content, which will be commenting on matters relevant to the website being promoted. This whole field of feature creation is a behind the scenes activity that can be slow but by leaving it in the hands of your optimisation professional it will not affect your organisation’s daily trading. To some extent, the abstracts themselves remain in the background too, which is why some search engine optimisation commentators disapprove of this method, insisting that these abstracts only contribute to the volume of spam on the web but when used wisely this method will increase the search engine positioning of the associated pages.

The area of biggest|greatest doubt is in the effectiveness|usefulness of a blog directly related to a business’s website. They have their uses as sources of information from performers and sporting organisations but may just be thought of as news items rather than blogs. Blogs are usually thought of as something extra that should be worth reading, but then needs to draw an audience. It is understandable to find blogs being written for special interest groups to report on activities within their field especially IT. One of the most widespread areas of this, inevitably, is search engine optimisation specialists. Many blog entries consist of backlinks to abstracts on other blogs by way of recommendation. This may add to the quantity of backlinks related to the website hosting the blog, and through them raise its ranking, but even these blog writers can be wary of encouraging responses to the blog feature if they only include backlinks to a reader’s own website.

A blog attached to only your organisation’s website may be of interest but without readers does not market widely and can be difficult to justify for a small business. Then again, the strangest of personal blogs can even draw a following in the right circumstances. Your search optimization agency will have access to a number of article banks that are prepared to receive its abstracts for publication, and this wider dissemination helps in elevating the reputation of your website.

It is quite easy for a web page that has been previously referenced to become inaccessible. This can be understood if your company’s
domain has to generate pages dynamically, but if content is more static it can put off intending buyers if the result from a search request is unreliable. The use of some search engine optimisation tools can help to reduce the possibility of that situation occurring. A lowly natural search engine positioning may not be the only reason that your organization is not attracting new visitors.

If the pages on your company’s website are not indexed, the search engines cannot find your website. When a potential client performs a search, he is looking on the search facility indexes, not the whole web, and the search facility indexes are not recreated for each site every day. The simple task of providing an updated site map file to the engines using tools such as Google Webmaster Tools will help when pages are revised. Where data does tend to be more unstable, such as with news services, it is wise to give the page a description that incorporates the date of publication as well as suitable keywords. This should allow you to maintain the stability of entry pages that have been given the full search engine optimisation treatment and keep the connections with the search facility indexes. Any entry pages that you operate should still contain meaningful content relevant to the chosen keywords, not just a list of backlinks.

Your search optimization professional will have reviewed the pages of your company’s website so that carefully chosen keywords are related to one page that can be found easily by a search request. Ideally those keywords will have been included into the page names so that the importance of the page is apparent and the keywords are now referenced more often in the indexes.

Your search engine optimisation professional will take a long time producing items that include backlink connections to specific pages on your website that help to raise the natural search engine positioning of those pages. Any damage to those backlinks caused by content improvements could affect the reputation of your website. This is also the most time consuming stage in the search optimization strategy and the effort should not be wasted.

There will come a moment when a page does need to be deleted from your website, and this should be handled by a sensibly coded redirection page that treats your client with respect. Where page content does need to change, search optimization still needs to be allowed for, so that the search engines will still be able to retrieve the content that is most relevant to the search request. It is understandable that some content should not be directly accessible from a search facility results listing with companies such as newspapers beginning to charge visitors to be able to reach website content. Some other websites do need to be more restricted for a number of reasons. For most companies, being sure that pages remain accessible to the search facility robots will keep the pages indexed to maintain the search engine positioning.

This presented a conundrum for early internet visitors as the vast amount of information on the web was still mostly unavailable to them under this search system. It was a bit like visiting a bookshop but only being able to look at books by authors that you were already familiar with. This heralded the arrival of a number of businesses which called themselves Search Engines. These businesses realised how important it was to websites to get people viewing their pages, and decided to attempt to create a system of enriching the results that were returned when someone searched for a general word or phrase rather than typing in a specific website address.

Initial attempts to design such a system were somewhat at the mercy of the webmasters who programmed websites for their employers. All search engines were reliant upon the text and coding behind any given website, and the first search engines generally utilised the repeated appearance of keywords as their source for returning results. But webmasters swiftly realised that they could swiftly improve their Online Marketing results simply by filling their website with the same keywords far too many times, or adapting the keywords within the metatags in the site’s coding so that the website would cheat the search engine into believing that its content was more appropriate than it actually was.

Since the reputation and success of the search engine companies was completely dependent on its capability to return good quality and relevant results, it was imperative that the search engines identified an improved way of measuring how relevant the Search Engine Placement of a specific website might be. As a result they began to develop more sophisticated means of measuring a website’s relevance by creating more elaborate algorithms which included external factors in addition to ‘on page’ keywords, thus making it much more complicated for webmasters to manipulate web pages that they had written.

One of the earliest innovators of this new way of monitoring search results was Google, which was set up in 1998, and swiftly attracted a dedicated user base. This institution has regularly been at the leading edge of attempts to ensure that unscrupulous Search Engine Placement is swiftly identified and the appropriate steps taken to block any websites using unethical Online Marketing techniques.

In recognition of the Search Engines’ need to provide the most reliable set of results for any online search, companies soon realised that it was beneficial to explore ethical ways of enhancing their chances of achieving a front page results listing for their website and this resulted in the arrival of the Search Engine Optimisation Company. These businesses employ a team of experts who will assess an existing website against actual search results and trends, recommend changes to improve its online standing and then work away from the website to provide off page optimisation which will improve its reputation still further. And what’s more, any decent, respected Search Engine Optimisation Company will do all of this in a manner which is completely acceptable to the online community, which means that in the end, the website itself gains additional visitors, all of those visitors will find the website appropriate to their search and the search engine will enrich its reputation for being reliable.

Although we are heading out our domestic economic downturn, the international recession continues to bite ferociously into people’s lives and company’s business opportunities. Companies of all ages, forms and sizes are struggling and the lingering fear of unemployment means customers are still not spending to the degree they once were, pre-recession. A very bleak picture, I’m sure you will agree, and one that shows no real sign of significant improvement any time soon.
Of course, this isn’t the first recession many organisations have faced. Those that have been around long enough will no doubt draw similarities with the economic slumps of the seventies, eighties and nineties. Although to some extent, the current depression may have hit harder than some of the previous down turns, smart organisations have always made it through bleak times in the past and using the right business strategies will do so now and in the future.
We’re all heard of perfectly operating companies going out of business, simply through lack of cash flow. Often, in order to keep the cash flowing, many organisations have sometimes irrationally cut back on advertising. These businesses have failed to understand that, in an increasingly tougher market place, a strong marketing campaign is a central requisite and not an optional one.
Many of the more savvy organisations out there realise this, and understand that economic downturns are sometimes the best time to increase market share, as competitors begin to lose theirs and inevitably go under. Let’s make no bones about this, it’s the survival of the fittest, and either you’re taking bites of someone else’s market pie or they are taking bites of yours.

Sad as it may be, as organisations fall by the wayside as a result of less than stellar business choices (including poor marketing decisions], their previous clients will still need those goods and services once provided by the now defunct company. A smart organisations that has had the insight to increase its marketing presence through utilising the right marketing techniques, will be highly visible to these abandoned customers, and be in the optimum position to win them over.

Of course recession is a phenomenon new to search engine optimisation. In fact there was no such thing as Online Marketing, period, when the previous big UK recession hit in the early nineties. But as savvy organisations survived then, by turning to traditional forms of advertising, such as TV, radio and printed media, the smart organisations of today are employing SEO as a fundamental part of their Online Marketing campaign. This enables them to gain high Search Engine Placement for their website, thus increasing their online presence.

The services of a Search Engine Optimization Company are properly more important now to business success than ever before. This will continue to be the case even when we are completely out of recession and far beyond. Companies of all forms and sizes will have to think long and hard about the importance of Search Engine Placement in relation to their Online Marketing and overall business campaign.

As for those companies who have yet to utilise the services of a Search Engine Optimization Company, they might well be seen as repeating the fatal mistakes of past businesses, and in due time, may be punished just as severely for them.

A lot of the effort needed by search engine optimisation is the gathering of backlink references to your organization’s domain through numerous methods. This includes the production of promotional documents which are distributed to various article banks designed to influence the organic search engine positioning of the pages of your organization’s website. To some search optimization specialists, all this feature production is not so useful after all. Backlink gathering continues to be an important element in the search platform algorithms, but some experts will argue that only a fifth of all backlinks arise from these sorts of documents. Thus, there is more effort needed to affect the rankings of a website.

There are search marketing experts who are now recommending that less effort needs to be directed at backlink gathering and into development of social media. The search platforms do seem to be including references on results pages drawn from Twitter or Facebook. There now arises the problem in deciding what can be done, if anything. Twitter does not appear to be a major concern, as by its nature it is changing into being a feed for news. For a commercial business there seems to be little chance of it attracting potential buyers.

Facebook and similar social networks continue to play a greater part in many internet users’ activities and seemingly beyond the compass of search engine optimisation tools, but for many organisations it just appears to be another outlet for news that could be released through other channels apart from the addition of being able to enumerate the friends of your page.

Something that can be classified as social media is a blog directly connected to your own website in addition to the documents which are produced to elevate the organic search engine positioning. Many search marketing experts argue that this is the most meaningful thing you can do. If you have something significant to say then the direct blog could be a way of attracting visitors, particularly if the direct blog allows visitor responses. However those visitor responses will need to be moderated carefully as they may consist of numerous backlinks to other people’s blogs, many totally irrelevant to your business. Your attempts at search optimization may unwittingly benefit others more. A direct blog does not need to be written daily, and if you have nothing significant to say then your website will be better off without. For a small business simply trying to sell goods and services it can be hard to understand the purpose of a direct blog.

Many search marketing specialists will argue that backlink gathering is becoming less important in influencing the organic search engine positioning of a website’s pages, and social media now requires greater concentration of effort. Social media can be seen as an additional element in search engine optimisation, but for many small companies, the degree of overhead in supporting social media to the fullest extent could far outweigh the benefits. When the information related to your organisation is being made available through several|multiple|numerous outlets|services, it is very easy to get out of step. It can be better to focus the marketing effort on using search optimization on the basic website which is accessible by the most buyers.

When is the best time for new firms to employ search engine optimisation. Is it after the first year, when they are better established, with a clear grasp of their company and their customer base? Maybe it’s after year three, when they’ve proved they are not just some fly by night outfit, have some solid investors on board, and are finally making a profit. The truth of the matter is, most firms catch on to search engine optimisation later than they should do. This is by no means to say, SEO is rendered useless if used later on in a company’s life cycle, far from it, SEO can noticeably increase website performance however late it is utilised. The point is, the sooner a good Online Marketing strategy is in place, the sooner a firm can start profiting from the high Search Engine Placement of its website, which SEO obtains.

One of the biggest hurdles faced by young firms working on SEO soon after a website launch, is the nightmare of having to juggle available recourses. This is frequently at a time when company internal services may already be severely stretched, due to having to deal with all the hustle and bustle which often follows after a website goes live. Although these kinds of restraints are anything but scarce in the world of business, having to contend with an Online Marketing strategy so soon after a website launch, may be perceived as simply being logistically unviable.

If there has to be a perfect time to invest in SEO, then it would be before the launch of the website. Getting in on the ground floor allows the Search Engine Optimization Company complete control of all those important website elements which are central in determining website ranking. If a site has just been built and lunched without SEO in mind, then some of the site architecture will have to be re-done by the Search Engine Optimization Company, in order to attain high Search Engine Placement. This may possibly disrupt product development, as-well as tying up precious recourses, effectively putting you behind where you might have already been if SEO was adopted at the start.

Having a good marketing momentum at the launch of a website is essential. Using SEO services at this stage will make sure the site has been indexed properly and has a single, definable aim which is effectively portrayed to search engines, through good on/behind page optimisation, accompanied by a solid link building strategy. This means the young website starts its life already visible to search engines and can begin the process of rank climbing straight away.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in all the logistics and detail of web development, when working on a website launch, but never forget the ultimate aim of all that hard work. The main purpose of a commercial website is to facilitate increased sales and to raise public awareness of the firm’s web presence and its particular goods and services. This can only be aqquired if search engine users actually locate the site. If possible, include SEO and Online Marketing in the core of your website building. This will save you time and money and ensure your new website, hits the ground running.

When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

Even though there are more sides to internet marketing than just email marketing (permission based), email has been the foundation that our business sits on.

Why do we rent movies or strap into rattling roller-coasters rides or watch, with teary eyes, romantic films or comedies? Why do people seek out the temporary release of alcohol or pharmaceutical and illegal barbiturates? People long for the long lost and ancient connection with their emotions.

People want to ‘feel’ something, anything and as a publicist it’s our job to play on that emotion to trigger a response. We are trying to activate a reaction from a willing candidate. Man has proven over and over again that they will purchase anything so long as it touches on those emotional pressure points.

The public decides to buy cars, houses and cloths all based on emotion. How does the ad or article make you feel when your emotions become tangled with this content? What elements are missing in the target consumer psyche and how can we fill that void while simultaneously branding our client’s product and calling the candidate to action?

We play on the sadness, hopes, fears and aspirations for one reason, to slowly draw the target market in on behalf of our client so that when they feel sad, hopeless, desperate or in need, this ‘brand’ comes to mind as the automatic answer to all of these issues.

Today’s online publicity marketer must have a solid comprehension of the target market’s emotional element, what makes them happy, sad, stressed etc in order to reap the full rewards of a campaign.

One should pay close attention to the colors, voice over tone, background music, video clip and image choice, vocabulary and on screen text with web commercial and take into consideration similar aspects when writing articles or creating ads.

These components lower the guard of the individual which allows a message to be embedded in the mind. This is done with music, film, political promotions and yes, even ads.

At the day’s end, results are what keep the clients coming back and if the advertising ingredients can cradle a sort of post hypnotic cue that calls a client to action, then the needs of the client are being met with branding and sale conversion and the emotional needs of the customer are being taken care of as well. This is one of the few times in life that there is truly a win/win relationship.

Want to find out more about Publicity Marketing, then visit Princeton Corporate Solutions’ site on how to choose the best Business Publicist for your needs.