Posts Tagged ‘ebay’

Most people think of websites as “passive marketing”.  Websites are passive marketing tools because customers have to come to the website on their own.  Websites do not find new customers, the serve customers that find you.  That’s not a completely true statement, but it is mostly true.
Passive Marketing
Passive marketing methods are dependent on people finding your website.  If we use that term liberally, then we can say that passive marking would include common search engine optimization (SEO), link exchanges, listings in link directories, word-of-mouth, business cards, etc. 
Passive marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization, are very important.  I encourage you to use all those techniques. In this article, we are going to build on the concept with more aggressive “Active Marketing” techniques. Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most discussed methods for improving traffic to your website.  Search engines, such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and others are all trying to help web surfers find what they are looking for.  This is harder than it sounds.  Search engine companies are always working on their advanced algorithms in order to produce better results for web surfers.  It is a very competitive industry.  SEO experts work very hard to keep up with the changes in the search engine industry.

I strongly recommend you use a professional SEO consultant for all of this.  It is a lot of work and there are special tools that make all this much easier.  You can do it yourself, but is it worth your time?  Only you can say.

Know your baseline - Make sure you have statistics enabled on your site.  I recommend Google Analytics.

Know your objectives - Are you selling something?  Looking for phone calls?  Or do you want people to sign-up for your newsletter.

Keyword Analysis - Keyword research tells you what keywords you should target in your SEO strategy.  These should be consistent with your objectives.  I recommend Word Tracker

Competitor Analysis - Search the major search engines using the keywords from your analysis.  Learn who your competitors are.  You will want to out-perform them with better keyword densities, more inbound links, etc.  I recommend Web CEO.

On-Page SEO - There are a number of on-page things to do.  Here are the most significant areas to optimize:

• Pages should have keywords in the filename. These keywords appear in the address bar.
• The page TITLE should have keywords. These keywords appear on top of the browser.
• META Tags (keywords and description) should have lots of keywords in them as well.
• All graphics should have ALT tags with keywords in them as well.
• Page content should include heading tags and emphasis tags to draw attention to key words and phrases on the page.
• Page content should have a high density of critical keywords.
• All links on your site to other pages on your site should have keywords in those links. Avoid using [click here]. Use keywords in the link.
• Create additional site content if necessary. Make sure you have all your keywords optimized somewhere on your site.
• Update your site regularly. The more updates the better. This is why blogs are so popular.

Off-Page SEO - There are many off-page SEO techniques.  We can only cover a few here:

• Write keyword-rich articles and submit them to free article sites. Write a lot of articles. Use an article submission service to get your articles out to more websites faster.
• Write comments on blogs and social networks and include links back to your site. Make sure your links always include keywords.
• Post ads on craigslist.org, ebay.com, and anywhere else you can place ads promoting your products or services.

Your ultimate goal is to have as many pages on your site as possible and for those pages to be keyword optimized.  Then you want as many links to your site from other sites and those links should have keywords in the clickable part as well.   This is a never-ending process.  Always add more content.  Always produce more inbound links.  It is a lot of work but it can pay off big.

It can take a while for your SEO efforts to be fruitful.  Just keep at it.  Watch your website work its way up the rankings.  You will thank me when you are #1.

If you ask any expert to help you get 100,000 visitors to your website, they will tell you it can’t be done, or at least you have to spend a lot of money to do it. If you use conventional methods then this is true. But let’s think out of the box. What if you could get your message in front of millions of people for free? What if you could do that instantly, for free, and as often as you want? There is a brand new frontier for Internet marketing and it’s called Social Media Optimization, or SMO.

So what is Social Media Optimization (SMO)? SMO is using social media web sites to promote your own web site, products, or services. Social media websites are all those websites where you can create a profile page and interact with others users with messages and videos. Sites like www.myspace.com , www.facebook.com , www.youtube.com , www.plaxo.com , www.linkedin.com , www.twitter.com , www.craigslist.com , www.ebay.com , www.wikipedia.org , and many more. Social media optimization is the art of using those sites to promote your own site. It takes a little practice, but master the art of SMO and you’ll have more traffic than you can imagine.

Objective #1 - Target Your Audience!
Your website must have products or information of interest to your audience. If you have more than one target customer, then you may need more than one “landing page”. Your landing page should captivate the visitor. If you are selling an e-book on marketing that caters to musicians, for example, then build a page that that touts that book and creates urgency for them. If you sell a similar e-book on marketing that caters to used-car salesmen, then create an entirely different page for them. Then promote the different pages separately. Have an entirely different campaign for each e-book.

Objective #2 - Sell Them Now or Lose Them Forever!
Urgency is the key to Internet marketing. Just assume that if your customer leaves your website then they are gone forever. Your marketing pages should sell a product, give away a product (in exchange for contact information), or collect their contact information for an email, blog, or newsletter. Don’t let them get away.

Social Media Marketing Basics
Nearly all of the social media sites allow you to add a link to your own website. You can add links to the profile page on most sites. You may be able to add links in the descriptions of videos you upload. Many popular blogs allow you to add links when you write comments that add value to their blogs. Start with youtube.com, then add your own site(s) on digg.com, del.icio.us, and other bookmark sites. Put links like [digg this], [add to yahoo.com], and RSS subscribe links on your blog pages. The concept is simple. You want a link to your website to be created on those popular sites. Master that art form and you will see your traffic explode.

I know you want to know more about this. It is a learning journey at first, but before long you will be a master. There are tips all over the Internet that can help as well. Now that you know about SMO you are well on your way to being a master Internet marketing.