2 Website Marketing Techniques That You Should Automate

There are many kinds of website marketing techniques that are being recommended today, and some of them don’t

require much of your time while others require quite a bit of your time.  However first thing is first… don’t confuse marketing techniques with a marketing strategy.  A properly designed online marketing strategy incorporates a number of techniques which work together to reach an overall goal.  The reason I want to emphasize this point is that some people take one technique like Social Media Marketing and think that it is their marketing strategy.  No, Social Media Marketing is just one technique that should fit into an overall plan that is designed to bring an overall goal into fruition, such as an increase in the number of leads you get from your web presence.

Now that you know that your social media activity is only a part of your entire online strategy and that it doesn’t replace you online marketing strategy, how can you add another marketing component to your Internet business strategy without getting overwhelmed? The answer is simple.  Using appropriate automation techniques will allow you to do more with less effort.

Below are some marketing automation techniques that will save you a lot of time in your marketing efforts.

1) Automated Blog & Social Media (SM) Integration

One technique that does bring more traffic to your website is to publish your blog postings to all of your social media sites.  This can obviously be done automatically by the typical cut and paste […]

Are You Building Your Website to Be An Online Asset?

Your web presence, especially your web site, is in reality an online asset.    What is an asset?  In the definition of Robert Kiyosaki’s  terminology, an asset

is something that generates income for you.  In his meaning, it is usually on a residual basis, however it doesn’t have to be.

In any case, your website can easily be an asset where it is generating residual revenue for your business.  Residual revenue can mean, receiving convertible leads for your company, or actually selling product/service from your website on a consistent basis.  The problem is that most business owners use their website as a online brochure.  Their online strategy doesn’t build upon their website and continue to add value to allow the website to powerfully add an additional revenue stream to their business. They don’t have a long term plan that would consistently build value to their website that they can capitalize upon.

The question is, did you originally set up your web site to be an online asset or an online brochure?  If you in reality have an online brochure and would like to transition your web site into being an online asset that generates residual revenue, there are some things that you will need to focus on in order to make that happen.

What are the factors that determine how well a web site generates ongoing revenue?

1) Targeted  Traffic:

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood to a website.  The more targeted the traffic is, the easier it is to connect with the visitors who come to the website and the easier it is to stand out from other websites […]

Using Your Website to Generate Quality Leads for Your Business

Your website is more than just an online brochure.  Your website can  actually be an active marketing partner for your business.

Think about it; your website is a sales rep for your business that works for you 24/7, takes no holidays or paid vacation (unless your hosting server goes down, but that shouldn’t be once a year and if it is, you should find a new hosting server).

The more business your website brings to you, the more your website is worth, and the ore your business is worth should you decide to sell it.  The systems in your business, especially the successful ones, are worth more than your client base because if you have successful systems established, then someone can come in and buy your business, because your business isn’t you, it’s your systems.

So let’s discuss systems that can get your website to be an active lead generator for your business…..

1) Autoresponder Followup Systems

In todays world, it takes an average of  7 touches to move a prospect into a client.  You want to have automated systems in place to begin to convert your prospects into clients and an autoresponder series is a perfect example of that.  Develop your autorespo nder series so that it does more than just send out a dozen emails about your products and services.  These emails should be thought out and take the prospect one step closer to wanting you to be their service provider.  One autoresponder tactic is to have an email series that discusses in detail the top X problems your […]

How to Make Money from Your Website – Advertising

There are many ways to make money from your website, especially by generating a residual income from it.  One of the ways to generate a residual income is through offering advertising opportunities on your website.  When most people think of doing advertising on their website, they think of things like banner ads and sponsored links.  Advertising is basically renting space on your site and getting paid a specified amount for it upfront.

There are may ways to sell advertising.  You can sell space for a one time fee, or rent space for a specific period of time.  Usually the more traffic a website has, the smaller the rental time increments you can offer.  I have seen websites sell sponsored links/banners on their websites for as small as 1 week increments, however these were websites that had a lot of inbound traffic every month.

What makes your website valuable to advertisers

Some websites will be more valuable than other sites depending upon certain characteristics.  The more valuable the website traffic is to these advertisers, the more you can charge for the adspace on your website.  The following are the factors to consider:

  1. Traffic – The more traffic you have on your website, the more visitors will see the ad and the more you can charge for ads on your site.  Adspace usually isn’t valuable to advertisers until you have at least 3000-4000 unique visitors a month.  The higher the quality of traffic, the lower the number of visitors you need.
  2. Traffic quality – this is the type and motivation of visitors who come to your site.  If most of the traffic to your website is from traffic exchanges (becoming defunct as a valuable source of traffic if it isn’t already), […]

3 Tips in Securing Your WordPress Blog

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform yet it isn’t without its weaknesses.  Because it is a popular open-source platform, it lends itself to becoming vulnerable to attacks from hackers. A number of WordPress blogs have been victims to these attacks.  There are some things that you can do however to reduce your vulerability and no longer become the low hanging fruit on the tree.  Here are 3 things you can do to secure your wordpress blog more tightly

1) Don’t use the default admin username.

One of the most important things that you can do to secure your blog is to use another login name for the admin other than the default login name.  When you install wordpress onto your website, most of the time, people tend to use the default login name of ‘admin’ and that makes it easier for hackers to get into your admin panel because then they only will need to guess the password.  This one thing alone can cut down on the the ease of hackers getting into your blog.

2) Keep your blog updated

WordPress is constantly coming out with new versions that have been tested against the latest known attacks.  These new versions keep your blog from being vulerable to the popular attacks that are out there.  It is quite easy these days to upgrade your blog , as it is as simple as clicking a button.  If the automatic upgrade doesn’t work, it is probably due to not enough space in your hosting account, or some change in the server setting that needs to be done.  If you do have enough memory, then contact your hosting server and let them know of the problem.  They should be able to change […]

WordPress Blogging Tips – Top Mistake Blog Owners Make

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform that can also be used as an

entire website.  This blogging software is powerful enough to fit the needs of most small businesses when it comes to using this platform to create an entire website.  In fact, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there today and in use by both large and small businesses.

One of WordPress’ major benefits is that it is very a flexible platform due to the large number of plugins available for the platform.  These plugins add functionality, therefore allowing WordPress to be able to fulfill most kinds of standard website application requirements. This is the main reason why this blogging platform is used by many website owners today.

Even with the quickly growing adoption of this blogging platform, many users still don’t know how to set up the blog so that it makes optimum use of its features to be able to improve their SEO ranking as well as automate some of the maintenance functionality that will save a lot of time and frustration in managing the website.

One of the biggest mistakes that WordPress users make is choosing the default setting in how the URL’s of the blog pages are created.  This is very important because the choosing the correct setting is an extremely easy way to improve the website’s SEO rankings.

The image below shows one of the permalink settings that should be used.  Notice something other than the default setting is picked…

Blog URL: Linking Settings

The reason why this setting […]

  • Strategies to use in conjunction for powerful SEO results
    Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy? Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

    Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

Are You Making These Mistakes in Your SEO Strategy?

In a WholeBrainGroup blog article I read the other day, it discusses the ‘7 deadly sins’ of

SEO.  Basically the article listed the sins as:

  1. Only feeding search engines (sacrificing good content for search engine tactics)
  2. Using industry lingo (not using what your market is truly searching for)
  3. Poorly created URL’s
  4. Not using enough analytics (useful for selling and converting)
  5. Generic sitewide tag descriptions
  6. Expecting overnight results
  7. No implementation of a long term strategy

In my opinion, the last two, while very heavily similar, are the ones that hurt business owners the most.  Not looking at the long view and seeing SEO as a quick one time shot in the arm, like a vaccine.  Because the search engines change their algorithms regularly, they tend to require the consistent SEO implementation activities to keep their web pages relevant and current.

Another big mistake on the part of business owners is that they oftentimes stop their SEO activity too soon.  Getting into the organic search engines is a process that must be implemented willingly and  persistently.  Be prepared to allow it to take  some time.  If you have very competitive keywords, and you are on a tight budget, it can easily take a year, especially if you don’t have the bandwidth to do many of the extra needed activities yourself.  It can be done sooner, if you have enough resources of time/money.  If you target the less competitive keywords first, you can end up on the 1st page in a couple of months or less with consistent activity.  My record was 30 minutes, but that […]

Lead Conversion and Tailored Content – Better Web Conversion?

In reading a  ChiefMarketer.com article I ran across, I had an interesting idea.  The article (link shared below), discussed using content, such as ebooks, webinars and teleseminars, and whitepapers to generate leads.  Although the article didn’t specifically mention it, you can use any form of content including articles, videos and audios/podcasts/internet radio shows as well.  The whole point of using this content is to inspire opt-ins into the sales funnel.

The whole point of this article, and it makes a good point at this, is that when you get the opt-ins and leads, from using these methods, you need to realize that the prospect is usually not ready to buy at this time.  They are in the research phase.  The know they have a problem, but they don’t know which direction to turn in to solve it.  So it’s not about selling the prospect once you get the lead information, but about supporting the prospect into realizing that your service is what they are looking for.  So what are the keyword in the last sentence?

1) Support

2) Service

You support the prospect because by sharing with them the information they require be able to know where to go to solve their problem.  If you share the information from a true mindset of service, you will naturally attract those to you that are your ideal target market and then guide those that aren’t part of your target market onto someone who would love to serve that segment of the market.  This is the “wealth is in the few” mentality that comes from having an abundant mindset of knowing there is plenty for everyone.

So how is this done?  Adding personalization through experiences and stories is usually a great way to […]

Email Automation Strategy Tip

Even with the rise in the use of Social Media among the masses, and thus your target market, email is still a very viable way of marketing to your prospects and strengthening your customer relationships.  News letters are much more effective at keeping your audience up to date on what you are doing in your business, or provide just enough valuable information to your readers that they are enticed enough to go to your business website to find out more information and take an action.

One automation process tip is to create an HTML page of your email, and send out an announcement to your social networks with a link pointing to the HTML page of your email.  This is tactic is great because it lets your extended social network, many of whom are probably not currently on your mailing list, get a chance to preview your email quality and then decide of they want to be on your mailing list or not.  When you are using the right email service, the HTML page is automatically created for you and a notice is sent out to your social networks with a link going back to the HTML page.  This takes a lot of manual steps out of your online marketing strategy, which makes it easier to implement and reduces implementation errors.

Another powerful tip for automating your email process combines the power of blogging and email marketing.  If you keep a regular blogging strategy, you can automate much of the email marketing process.  You can set up your email service to automatically send out to your mailing list the latest post of your blog.  The more sophisticated programs will allow you to set up how often […]

Top 3 Tips For Writers To Generate Income

Content, especially original content is gold on the Internet, however, if you don’t know what to do with that content, you won’t be able to use it to generate additional revenue streams for your business.  There are many traditional writers out there who are very frustrated with how the Internet has changed their livelyhood.  They are now competing with writers who are willing to write for free and are slowly seeing their means of getting paid to do writing (especially providing content for online media sources such as blogs and other online publications) quickly diminishing.  That way of making a living is going the way of the dinosaur in most cases.  Sure, there are still some opportunities available for the traditional paid writing gigs, but they are not as prevalent as they used to be, and the pay isn’t what it used to be either.

So what is a writer to do?  A writer (a good writer especially) doesn’t realize that they are a walking gold mine unto themselves, and even though their original means of making a living are disappearing, new ways of making a living have sprung up that actually provide much greater potential in revenue.   There is one major reason for this increase in potential.  That reason is due to the fact that as a writer, you no longer have to exchange hours of your writing for dollars.  Let’s face it, with the traditional methods, you would get paid per job.  You can only do so many jobs because there are only so many hours in a day.  An enterprising writer could use interns to expand their job capacity, however if you are your brand, you put that at risk by […]