Free Marketing = Effective MarketingWritten by Brandon Milford
Free Marketing = Effective Marketing By Brandon MilfordAccording to Google.com there are over three billion web pages online today. So what are you doing to separate yourself from crowd? How are you targeting your customers? How much capital are you investing in marketing? Is it working? I hear many business owners complaining about inability to successfully drive targeted customers to their website. I listen as they tell me about purchasing e-mail lists and buying advertising spaces on related websites. While these methods may work there are free and effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your site. The first is ever popular search engines. There are a number of ways to successfully optimize your website for search engines and subsequently receive better rankings. Search engine optimization is an enormous topic and there have been many books written on subject and businesses specializing in this service, but I will give you a few important pointers on optimizing your website. First, be sure to have a great deal of relevant content on your website that is no more than three levels deep (the search engine’s crawler does not typically search more than three levels down). This content can include articles, white papers, case studies etc. Second, be sure to have a large number of websites linking to yours. Trade links with other website owners and place their links in a ‘Resources’ section on your website. One of important variables, among many, that Google will use in your ranking is number of relevant websites that are linking to yours. So be sure majority of incoming links to your website are from businesses that provide similar offerings. Third, be sure to include accompanying text links to all of your pages if your current page links are buried within images. This is important because crawler cannot see images, but it can find text links. The next way to drive free targeted traffic to your website is to include a link to your site and small ‘hook’ in your email signature. I’m surprised at how many business owners still do not do this. This hook will be one sentence that tells your audience what you do. This “small ad” of sorts will be on every email you send out. Example: --- John Smith President ABC Company “Providing communications solutions in a technology driven world”
| | Are You A Marketing Octopus or A Marketing Worm?Written by André Bell
One of greatest challenges to effectively marketing a business is determining which marketing method is best suited for your business.Most people look at what their competitors are doing to market their businesses and then simply imitate that, whether good or bad. The best marketing strategy does not involve selecting only one or two marketing approaches that we see others using. The best marketing approach resembles an octopus. An octopus is very effective at catching food with eight limbs. If octopus loses one limb it may momentarily lose some of its strength and agility, but it adapts and continues on as an effective hunter and predator. It’s same with marketing your business. The more marketing approaches you use simultaneously more successful you can become and easier it is to continue growing your company. You will continue to thrive despite challenges that your competitors may face. No setback in any one marketing approach will ever devastate you or pose major problems. Despite many options available most companies use no more than two or three marketing methods at best to grow their company. Few realize that there are over 100 methods for bringing in new business, for increasing web traffic, for selling more to existing clients, and for increasing repeat sales that their competitors are not using. They basically imitate worms in their marketing attempts. A worm’s approach to life is singular. It does not use multiple limbs because it has none. Its existence is slow and labor-intensive. Very unlike an octopus.
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