Inbound Marketing

Blogging for Business

by blogmistress on August 6, 2012

As I mentioned in the Inbound Marketing 101 webinar, blogs can be a very powerful tool in your internet marketing. Remember, studies have shown that companies that blog get 55% more traffic and convert 40% more of that traffic into leads. That is pretty incredible. Search engines love blogs and so do people.

If you missed the webinar, you can still get the recording of it. Actually, there was a slight technical problem with the recording so we are re-recording it this morning and will send out the link to it today. Since we discussed what a powerful tool blogging can be, we thought it would be a good idea to have blogging for business be the focus of the next webinar that is coming up on August 15th at 2 p.m. central time. Registration for that will begin tomorrow.

In preparation for the blogging webinar, you might want to go ahead and do some keyword research. Here is the link to the free Google keyword tool that I mentioned: www.googlekeywordtool.com/. Try it out and see what people are searching for to find you and then come to the webinar to see how to use those keywords effectively.

Happy Monday, be sure to come back tomorrow to sign up!

 

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Who Should Do Your Marketing?

by blogmistress on August 3, 2012

I saw this interesting flowchart over on our partner, HubSpot’s site this morning and wanted to share it with you. It will help you decide whether or not it is a good idea to outsource your marketing.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

internet marketing flowchart




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Are You Generating Leads and Sales?

by blogmistress on July 30, 2012

inbound marketingI have enjoyed watching the Olympics this past weekend. It is fun to see sports that you otherwise don’t really see much. One of those is the synchronized diving. I liked what one of the commentators said as the American divers were taking their last dive. She said, “What do you do when the pressure is on? You make your last dive your best dive.” I think that is true in business as well, we need to make every interaction with our customers and potential customers our very best.

It is never too late to start filling your sales funnel with lots of highly qualified leads that can become your customers by leveraging the power of Inbound Marketing. If you aren’t focused on using the internet properly, you’re missing valuable opportunities to get more business.

Join me this Wednesday, August 1st at 2 p.m. central time as I show you the steps you need to take to make your web presence a marketing machine that delivers high quality,  leads (potential customers) for your business.  

Here is the agenda, give me 45 minutes and I’ll show you:

  • What the number one tool is to help your website get found online.
  • How to integrate social media in to your plan to get more leads.
  • How to get more visitors to your website to convert into high quality leads.
  • How to achieve measurable results in the most efficient and effective way.
  • And so much more . . .

Marketing has changed and if you are still marketing the way you did even 5 years ago, you are missing out on a ton of leads and customers that you could have for your business.

Register now, because this event will fill up fast.



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And, don’t forget to share this webinar with your friends and colleagues so they can learn more about inbound marketing too!

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Successful Internet Marketing Isn’t Magic

by blogmistress on July 23, 2012

Ever wonder why some businesses succeed at internet marketing and some don’t? To succeed at internet marketing, you must follow a process.

Set goals – decide where you want to be. If you have no destination, you won’t be able to devise a strategy to get anywhere. Setting goals is very important to successful internet marketing.

Define your target market – who is your target market? What needs are you meeting? What problems are you solving for them?

Now that you have goals and have defined your target market, you can devise a strategy to meet your goals. Successful internet marketing involves three steps:

  1. Attract – Make sure your target market can find you online. Some of the strategies involved may be search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, blogging, pay-per-click, etc. What is involved in the “attract” area will be determined by your goals and your target market.
  2. Convert – Now that you have attracted your target market to your internet presence, it is time to convert them into leads and customers. This involves educating your visitors, implementing appropriate calls to action and landing pages. Again, what your specific strategy will involve is determined by your goals and your target market.
  3. Analyze – How are your efforts paying off? Measure your visits, your conversion rates, your leads to customer rates. Are you reaching your goals? Do you need to make adjustments? If you aren’t measuring, you will have no way of knowing if you are successful or not. This is no time to guess about your success or to measure how you “feel” you are doing. Get the data and analyze it and make sure you are spending your time and money wisely.

Successful internet marketing isn’t magic, it isn’t something that just happens. It is something that takes planning and work.

Coming soon, we will be offering a series of free webinars focused on internet marketing/inbound marketing. Be looking for details coming this week!

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Lead Generation and Calls to Action

by blogmistress on July 16, 2012

When people land on your website/Facebook page/Pinterest page, etc., what will they find? What is on your site that converts visitors into leads and customers? On every part of your web presence, you should be giving people an opportunity to become a lead or a customer. This is where CTAs (Calls to Action) come in.

There are different types of CTAs depending on where your visitor is in the sales process. For an ecommerce site, the CTA is easy- Buy Now. For other businesses, you may need a little more creativity. You may need to create offers that inform and nurture your visitors.

When you are creating CTAs, remember to always keep your visitors’ needs and desires in mind. Offer CTAs that inform and educate. Often, visitors are looking for information that will help them in their buying decision. You can create whitepapers and eBooks that are informative about your product or service that will educate your visitors. Perhaps, your visitors are looking for special offers. That is another great CTA. Offer a special deal for your visitors that they can’t get anywhere else. Not only is this effective for turning visitors into customers, it’s also a great way to track the effectiveness of your CTA.

What CTA can you create today that will convert your visitors into leads and customers for your business? Creating CTAs is an important part of inbound marketing that you cannot ignore if you want to be successful at internet marketing.

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Does Your Website Perform?

by blogmistress on July 12, 2012

1&1 Internet recently reported that up to 40% of small and medium size businesses still don’t have a website. That is shocking news. Social media has, in many cases, taken the place of the business website; but business owners need to understand that social media, while very important, is a tool in an overall marketing strategy. A business website is also a very important tool, but it must be a website that performs.

In the past, a business could just put up a static site and call it a day. Today, your website must attract visitors, educate them and convert them into customers. That is a lot to ask of a website, but when done right, it can bring a significant return on your investment. Businesses must integrate social media, content, blogging and more to meet the demands of today’s consumers.

Consumers now want to be educated, they want to be informed more than “sold.” This is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior.

website performance

What are you doing to inform consumers about your products and services? When a visitor comes to your site, are they getting information that will help them make a buying decision? Can they find it easily? Realizing the power of information is a great first step in making your website an inbound marketing machine that performs like a champion.




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Do You Really Need SEO?

by blogmistress on July 11, 2012

SEO New Orleans

Is this you?

SEO refers to search engine optimization. It is the science (and art) of helping your site (and thus your business) get found online. Inbound marketing consists of three steps:

  1. Get Found
  2. Convert
  3. Analyze

The reason getting found is first is because it doesn’t do you any good to have a beautiful website with great functionality if people can’t find you when they need or want your product and services.

We often get calls from businesses that have beautiful websites that are not getting visitors. In most of these cases, a quick review of the website in question will reveal that the website’s designer did not include even the most basic on-page SEO.

SEO is not only very important, it’s also something that is an ongoing process. Adding new, fresh content on a regular basis is a great way to improve your SEO. The easiest, and least expensive way to do this is through blogging. Blogging gives you the opportunity to rank for your keywords. Every time you write a new post that is informative to your readers and uses your keywords, you are adding another page to your site for search engines to index and deliver to people who are searching.

Ignoring SEO is part of the “spray and pray” style of marketing – you throw something up on the web and pray that it will work. Obviously, the “spray and pray” method of internet marketing is not very effective. Don’t ignore SEO. Use it to help your site get found by people who are looking for you.

Need help getting started with SEO? Download the SEO 101 eBook now.




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3 Ways to Improve Your Internet Marketing

by blogmistress on July 9, 2012

Internet Marketing New OrleansMonday is a great day to start improving your internet marketing to help your business. Here are three things you can do this week to help you attract more visitors, and convert them into leads and customers for your business.

  1. Identify new keywords – check out your analytics (you do have analytics for your site don’t you?). See what keywords people are using to find you and then brainstorm what words are working and what needs improvement. Use a keyword tool to see how many times those words are searched, and then optimize your site for those words.
  2. Create new blog posts. Blog posts are a perfect way to optimize for your newly identified keywords. Use the keywords in your post title and in your post as well. Use those keywords effectively so they can be ranked by search engines and make sense to your readers too. Provide useful information to your readers. This will help you attract more traffic.
  3. Now that you have optimized your posts and have attracted more traffic, you need to create a great call to action. What can you offer your visitors to convert them into leads for your business? Perhaps you can create an informative whitepaper or eBook. Maybe, you should offer a demo or a sample of your product. Be creative and come up with something that is useful and helpful to your visitors and that will get them engaged.

Okay, those are 3 easy steps that you can take this week to get started improving your internet marketing. Get started this week and then repeat these three steps each week and see what happens. What ideas do you have for improving your internet marketing this week?

Want some more ideas? Download the free eBook, Essential Guide to Internet Marketing today.

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The Golden Rule

by blogmistress on June 26, 2012

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That rule is not only golden for our personal lives, but it is golden for our businesses as well. People remember where they get good service. They remember where someone gave them a little bit more than expected- a lagniappe in our neck of the woods. They remember, they return and they also refer others.

You may be wondering how this transfers to online marketing. Think about your presence online. You can offer a little bit more information with a blog. You can provide information and discussion through social media. When you are online looking for information, don’t you appreciate the businesses that take the time to provide just a little more information and keep that information up to date? What about businesses that respond to your comments and questions on social media? Doesn’t that make a better impression than those that ignore you and your questions, and offer only the bare essentials of information?

We offer lots of information about online marketing on this blog. Some have told us we should keep some of these things secret because our competitors may see what we are doing and try to steal it. That is absurd. If we are doing something that is helpful to businesses, we hope that anyone who does internet marketing would do the same, go the extra mile. It helps everyone in the long run.

Do unto others . . . it’s golden.




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inbound marketingMarketing isn’t rocket science . . . it’s harder – that chapter title in Rules of the Hunt by Michael Dalton Johnson really caught my attention. Johnson contends:

Marketing is not a do-it-yourself job. The talent and creativity needed to do it well are rare. There are no easy-to-follow formulas. Marketing is no place for amateurs.

He continues:

It’s remarkable how many people think that, by starting a business, they have somehow become marketing experts.

The basic concepts are simple and easy to understand, but, like many things, the devil is in the details. The old adage about poker comes to mind: It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.

While marketing doesn’t take a lifetime to master, unless you have a few years of successful marketing experience, you don’t know much about marketing.

I suspect that businesses lose millions, perhaps billions, each year both from the cost of paying for marketing that doesn’t work and sales lost by amateurish marketing.

Does that sound harsh? It is actually true. Many say that marketing is just common sense, but for many it is common sense after the fact. People see something that is working and they say, “that makes sense.”

With the growth of the internet and social media, marketing is becoming more and more competitive. The average person is bombarded by around 3,000 marketing messages a day. The challenge is in making your message stand out. The world of internet marketing can be very dangerous for do-it-yourselfers.

Some businesses try to save money by opting to hire:

  • Anyone who is under 25 (often a relative) because they grew up using the internet and know their way around.
  • Someone who claims to be an “expert” because they have been online for a long time and they seem really nice.

While there is nothing wrong with being young, related and nice, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to know your way around the internet, none of these are actual qualifications of a true internet marketer. By hiring someone who does not have measurable, successful marketing experience, a business risks losing precious time and money.

Entrepreneurs often think they have to do everything on their own and build their business all by themselves. That simply isn’t the case. By working with experienced marketing professionals, business owners can often build their business faster, more efficiently and more economically than they can when they try to go it alone.

Need help with your marketing? Contact us!

 

 

 

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