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Posts Tagged ‘Internet Marketing’

Internet Marketing for Your Business

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Tulsa Internet Marketing Why do you have a website? If your primary reason for having a website is simply because your competitors have a website and you feel like not having one will hurt your business, then I’m willing to bet that you haven’t updated your website in weeks or even months. Mr. Business Owner, this is doing you more harm than good. Your website is a sales tool, and quite frankly, one of the most powerful ones that you’ll ever have. Gone are the days of having a website and not updating it for weeks and months. Not OKAY! You may not see this because you are still thinking about the good ‘old days of direct mail marketing where you got a 4% return one year on a direct mail piece that you really liked. Woopty-freakin-do. Or, maybe you are in a service-related industry that involves some door to door sales so you rely on your sales force to hit the sidewalks to drum up some new leads.

Can I tell you a secret? It’s sad, but people don’t want to talk to people!! They want to Google it. If I get a flyer on my door for a new lawn company start-up, and I need a lawn service, I don’t call the number on the flyer. I go to my computer and Google “Tulsa lawn service” and see who comes up on page 1. Someone on those search results is gonna get my business, even though I have a flyer in my hand from someone that really wants it and took the time to bring me their sales piece. Why would myself and hundreds of thousands of consumers do this? Because we want to do business with a company that is current and on the cutting edge of promoting what they do, not someone that is still in the dark ages. I have to ask myself the question, “if they won’t take the time to learn how to promote their company or service online, what other shortcuts are they taking to provide their service to increase their profit margin? ”

You don’t have to know how to do everything! Just do some homework and find out enough to ask the right questions so you can hire the right person or company that can do the work for you! There are hundreds of web designers and Internet marketers in your city or town that are dying to get your businesses and will bend over backwards and work out some kind of deal, or even trade-out, to make it happen. There are hundreds of online content developers that know their industry like you know yours, and they are familiar with the local market and your competitors.

Stop waiting to see if phone book advertising, direct mail, and telemarketing are going to make a come back. Don’t assume that you will have to pay an arm and a leg to have an effective presence online. Read our last post about What Every Business Owner Should Know About Online Advertising.

Or, if you need some help, contact us! We’ve done consulting for many companies over the years to help them find the right fit for their needs online after we discovered that Innovated Media wasn’t a good fit for them. I will say, however, that several of those companies we consulted became our clients weeks later after they chose a company that couldn’t deliver on their promises.

Tags: advertising, business promotion, Innovated Media, Internet Marketing, marketing, Tulsa Internet Marketing, Web Design
Posted in Online Marketing, Web Design, advertising, marketing | 1 Comment »

What a Medium Size Business Should Know about Advertising Online

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

Many small businesses do not have an advertising budget for what I believe to be a few reasons. It’s not that they don’t advertise, but they just don’t know how much they should spend on advertising and online marketing. The sad truth is that in order to go from a small business to a medium sized business, you’ve got to have some knowledge of these things. In order for you to be a successful medium size business that outperforms your competitors, you’ve got to know exactly how much you can spend, and how much you should spend.

Website Costs

On average, expect to pay between $45 – $75 an hour for web design projects. This varies depending on the market you are in. Typically, you should expect to pay anywhere from $900 on up for a newly designed custom website depending on what you need to the site to do. For example, if you need a fully customizable shopping cart with multiple products and custom shipping options, expect to pay over $2,500. Web hosting is anywhere from $85 to $200 a year. We work with and recommend Media Temple. They are used by Sony, Nike, and Starbucks, and we’ve used them since 2006, and we have been very happy.

Search Engine Optimization Costs

Absolutely do not skimp out on this area of your online budget. For this type of work, for a 10-page website, you should allow 4 – 6 hours for the initial optimization upon launch at a standard rate ranging from $45 – $75 per hour. On a monthly basis, allow for 3 – 5 hours of ongoing SEO work, depending on how often and how much your website changes.

SEO work on your website can be done in a number of ways. There are entire companies that focus only on SEO, but it’s helpful to find a web development or design firm that can do the website project along with the search engine optimization for the site, like we do at Innovated Media. In my opinion, the company that takes care of the monthly updates for the website should be the same one that does the SEO, otherwise you’ll have two companies crossing paths and making different changes to the same website thus taking longer than it should to accomplish both tasks. Search Engine Optimization companies should have a thorough working knowledge of how to build and maintain a website, since the construction of a website has quite a bit to do with optimizing a site for Google and the other major indexes.

SEO companies that only know SEO and do not stay current on software upgrades, trends of web design/development, and programming languages are going to have a hard time when development knowledge crosses hairs with actual search engine optimization work. What happens if they make changes to the site and a loss in formatting occurs? Well, the website is broken until the developer that designed the site can go back in and make the necessary repairs, and again costing the client more money than necessary.

In short, make sure that the company you choose for search engine optimization work has a decent portfolio of websites that they have built as well as ones they promote. Having everything under one roof is the ideal situation. If you don’t believe me, watch this video from Brain Fitness Strategies, one of our clients.

Internet Marketing & Paid Ad Words Campaigns for Local Search

Local Search results is what you want to drive more traffic to your site, and leads to your business. Depending on how far out your definition of “local” is, expect to pay anywhere from $299 – $599 per month on a good, solid Internet Marketing Campaign for your business. Internet or Search Engine Marketing isn’t necessarily work being done to your actual website, but instead it is work that is done to promote your website and contact information to local directories, video websites such as YouTube, and through paid Ad Words campaigns.

It is smart to use an Ad Words Certified expert to handle your Ad Words campaign. Do not assume that your web developer knows how to do this, even if he/she tells you they can get it done. This is a particular skill that requires specific training and understanding in order for your money spent on the campaign to actually drive quality traffic to your site. Paid Ad Words programs can work well with a monthly Internet marketing campaign that provides content development, directory submission(s), customer reviews, and good in-bound links to your site, which are all important Search Engine Marketing strategies.

Since this type of work does not require access to your actual website, we encourage clients to use companies that specifically specialize in this type of work known as Local Search or Search Engine Marketing. Many of our clients use BizNDex, based out of Skiatook, Oklahoma. We monitored a 4-month campaign with one of our larger clients, LawnAmerica. As you can see from the results below, From Jan 1 – May 1, the website traffic went up consistently compared to the year before. This makes sense, because the campaign that BizNDex implemented for LawnAmerica was during this range of time.

What made the difference? It wasn’t so much the content that was added to the website and optimized – it was the Internet Marketing campaign that they used with BizNDex that included paid and organic benefits for local search results. The numbers speak for themselves.

Direct Mail, Billboards, Phone Books, and Print Advertising

Why are you reading this section? Stop spending your money on these advertising mediums!!!! You don’t us a phone book anymore, and neither do your customers!! How will you ever know if money spent on these things will ever yield a return on your investment? You won’t! Put your money towards something that will show you exactly what your budgeted advertising dollars are doing. That’s why we love Internet marketing, and it should be the reason you love it

Video Production Costs

It’s not a fad or something to do that’s cool, Mr. Business Owner. Online video drives traffic to your site, and keeps them there. It’s proven that the amount of time a visitor spends on your website increases up to 7 times if there is a video on the landing page. Simply put? People want the content to come to them. If they don’t have to read, they appreciate the effort you took to accommodate their laziness to provide the information to them without them having to do anything. At least that’s my take on it. It falls right in line with creating the path of least resistance to help your visitors make a buying decision. A 60-second video spot can cost anywhere from $400 – $2,500, depending on the quality of the video you are looking for. Or you can go out and buy a Flip camera and see if you have a cousin or nephew that has figured out how to edit and upload videos to YouTube. It’s not rocket science. A last note: make sure the company you are working with knows about video production AND a little search engine marketing so they understand how the video should be promoted online in order for it to work.

Video testimonies are also a powerful way to help your visitors decide to you use instead of one of your competitors. It shows that you care about your company enough to provide testimonies of real people that have been satisfied with your product, and evidently they were satisfied enough to take time out of their busy schedule to say something about your product or service. Oh yeah, and the testimony (what they say) is important to (haha)! We’ve had scores of new clients in the last 3 weeks decide to sign with us because of a video testimony that we put out from Brain Fitness Strategies.

Bottom line: if you aren’t using online video, you are way behind and need to stop avoiding it.

In Closing

Stop advertising the way that you used to, even 6 months ago! The world, the Internet, and mobile devices are changing the way that people look for your product and service. Stop ignoring social media and thinking it’s just a way that your employees can waste time while they are on the clock. Its not a fad – it’s how people communicate now. Stop referring to Internet marketing as “spending money on our web page” or “Internet thingy.” Even though you will hire a company to do this work for you, you yourself should know at least a little about it so you can choose the right company that will fit you and your organization well. Otherwise, you could get taken by an online company that has shady business practices and only interested in your budgeted ad dollars. It’s best, in my opinion, to go with a local service provider for these services. Go buy a book about Internet marketing for medium size business owners, and look through all of the analytical data that they provide, and read the case studies that they did. Don’t be ignorant when it comes to redirecting advertising dollars that you were considering using for a half-page phone book ad to use online instead. Know what you are doing before you pull that trigger, or you’ll walk away thinking it didn’t work, when in reality you just didn’t know what you were getting yourself into, and had unrealistic expectations.

Tags: advertising, Google, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, search engine optimization, search engine placement, SEO, Tulsa Internet Marketing
Posted in Local Search, Online Marketing, Online Video, SEM, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Video Production, Web Design, advertising, marketing | 1 Comment »

Search Engine Optimization Basics in Dreamweaver CS4

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Ah, yes. The wonderful world of online search and SEO. I’ve said it a million times and it’s worth repeating: it is no longer okay to put a website together without optimizing the site for local search results! With the economy the way that it is, business owners are forced to be smarter with how they apply their funds to generate leads and sales. Phone books are dead, and with billboards, direct mail, print & newspaper advertising, it is hit or miss at best and even then it’s nearly impossible to justify those advertising dollars with analytics / metrics that show what type of response, if any, that was generated. That’s the beauty of Internet marketing, and where we come in as developers to help these business owners and companies that depend on increasing web traffic to keep money coming in!

While these development tactics are never-ending, we’ll just go over the basics that should absolutely apply to every website.

1. The Title Tag

Most titles for each HTML page should stay under 100 characters or about 10 words. Some search engines just chop them off after about 60, but 100 is safe I think. There are lots of different opinions on this, and different resources that will tell you different things, but I think as long as you don’t go nuts you just be fine. This will force you to do some creative writing. The stronger keywords and phrases need to be at the beginning of the title tag. Also, title tags need to appear someone cosmetic – they are visible to visitors at the top of the browser.

Example:
Tulsa House Call Doctors,house calls in tulsa, house calls in ok, doctor house calls, housecall,

Should be:
Tulsa House Call Doctors | Medical House Calls in Tulsa | Doctor House Calls in Tulsa

It’s also important to note that the Title tags throughout the site should not be identical. This will help the site you are optimizing to have several different listings on the first page for local search results, which is what we want.

2. Check Internal Links!

Make sure that the links in the navigation as well as inline text links go to the correct / corresponding pages in the site. It’s best to test the site in your browser, and click on all of the pages in the navigation menu andin the content of the body of the page to make sure they match the pages you developed content for, and if you don’t have content for a page in the navigation, maybe just put “need content” on the page if you are still working on the site or are waiting for copy from the client.

Also, make sure none of the hyperlinked/underlined text in the content is linked with “#” – it doesn’t go anywhere! Every link on the site should go somewhere…preferably to another page on the site. Linking to other internal pages other than on the navigation menu helps the search engine spiders find all of the pages of the site more easily.

3. Naming HTML Files

HTML files and folders should not include “a” “the” “but”, etc. Example: “schedule_a_visit.html” The new SEO information that we are seeing come out as technology moves rapidly forward says to use hyphens instead of underscores, and take out conjuntions and joining words. So, it should be “schedule-visit.html”.

4. Keyword Named Folders

Keyword-named folders are a huge thing with Google right now. It’s a good idea to pick two or three of the website’s primary search terms and create folders of them for the pages that you plan to optimize for the site. Good examples:

/tulsa-house-call-doctor/schedule-visit.html (instead of schedule_a_visit.html)

/home-medical-visit-tulsa/medical-questions.html (instead of faq.html)

/doctor-house-call-tulsa/laren-hightower-bio.html (instead of dotors_bio.html)

If you use WordPress to blog or manage entire websites even, you’ll notice it does this automatically (depending on how your permalinks are setup) when you create new pages or posts.

Search Engines look for those keyword-named folders. They are an important part of local search and search engine optimization. Another important SEO tip: After a site is launched, and we have about 45-60 days of analytics data, it’s not a bad idea to go back and re-optimize those folders with the actual keywords that are being used to find the site’s content. In the beginning of development, you are kind of guessing, but educated guesses are usually close if you know what you are doing. Remember web content should be modified based on the actual data that we know. Analytics help us to do that. Example: if the analytics tell us that people are typing in “tulsa house call doc” instead of spelling it out like we think they will, “tulsa house call doctor” then we should go back and rename the folder /tulsa-house-call-doc/schedule-visit.html.

5. The META Description

The meta=description is super important. It is what we use to control the way search results are displayed. If you don’t enter a description tag in the page, Google will generally pull from the first few lines of text that it finds. So, those first few sentences should be WELL optimized. The H1 tag should contain the strongest keywords, and the first sentence or two should include the same keywords in sentence form. Once you’ve crafted a well thought out H1 tag and first couple sentences, just re-write the first two sentences slightly different, but with the same keywords, and make that your description.

Example:

H1: Tulsa House Call Doctors

First two lines of copy: Tulsa House Call Doctors is Tulsa’s premier medical house call service providing world class, non-emergent, discrete, personalized medical care to infants, kids, teens, and adults in the comfort of your home, hotel, office, workplace, or assisted living center by an experienced, caring, board certified physician.

META Description: Tulsa House Call Doctors provides medical house call service to Tulsa residents with acute medical needs in Tulsa and surrounding areas.

6. Alternate Image Tags

Alt Image Tags are still important to Google simply because Google Images is a good way to search for images when developing content for a blog or website. Example: if I wanted to find a logo for McDonalds, the websites that have the McDonald’s logo on them that took the time to optimize their images with Alt Image Tags are more likely to have their website displayed for those image results in Google. Just another way to get people to go to your site….even if they aren’t there to make a buying decision. Traffic is traffic. You never know what will happen when they see your site. Usually, just the graphics on the page that are NOT part of the layout need to have ALT image tags in them.

7. The Sitemap

This is a simple one. Search engines find pages through hyperlinks, but not just any kind of hyperlink. Primarily, the text hyperlinks that go to other pages on a website you are developing are the ones you need to pay attention to and focus on. An image or graphic that links to a page on your site will not be followed by a search engine spider. So, what happens when you build a navigation menu completely from images? I’ve been guilty of it, and so have other developers. What do you do to ensure that the search engine spiders find all the pages on your site? Enter the sitemap. There are dozens of ways to do this, but I think the best way to do it is just build a page that lists all of the pages on the website in an organized fashion, and make sure all of the pages on your website link to the sitemap page. IMPORTANT: when creating content weeks and months after you launch the site, don’t forget to add new pages to the sitemap. The sitemap needs to be accurate!! On a side note, WordPress has great plugins that build your sitemap for you when you create new pages so that you don’t have to remember to update it every time to you make a change to your website. Below is an example of a site that we manage, www.tonycooke.org. It’s basically just an outline-format list of all the pages on his site:

In closing, these are just A FEW search engine optimization tactics that you should put into practice without exception. If you’d like more resources on SEO from a developmental standpoint, I recommend subscribing to Website Magazine, and frequently read their blog. They provide excellent white papers and up-to-date knowledge about how to create online content to make the first page of Google, and how to drive more traffic to a website. They also have a great iPhone app that delivers content from their blog via RSS.

Tags: Alt Image Tags, dreamweaver, Google Images, Internet Marketing, local search, Naming HTML Files, organic search results, search engine optimization, SEO, sitemap, title tags, WordPress
Posted in Local Search, Online Marketing, SEO, Web Design | No Comments »

Smart Business Owners are Marketing Online

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

I’m currently reading a book entitled The New Rules of Marketing and PR that my friend and local business owner Brad Johnson of Lawn America loaned to me. It’s quite good! I came across a story about a company that we all know and can identify with, and I found it relevant to many of the business owners that I speak to every week. So, I thought I’d share…

Century 21 Real Estate LLC is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant comprising approx. 8,000 offices in 45 countries. You’ve seen Century 21’s TV ads before, but you haven’t seen them lately. In 2009, the company pulled its national TV advertising and invested those resources into online marketing. That’s a huge move considering the amount of TV they were doing.

Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21, stated, “we are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is most significant. In 2008, we found that our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more traditional TV media investments.” They turned to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, to name a few. Actually, YouTube is a large component of their activities, and they are putting a lot of their attention into developing that medium to promote their brand.

It’s easy to see the logic behind that. As a business owner, you should always go with the mathematical explanation to support why you make decisions like this. What you think may happen and can’t be tracked or proven. There is a lot of calculated data to support investing online and doing some Internet marketing. However, business owners are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and spread their ideas online, taking the content to the people. It’s easier to do than ever before. Ridiculously simple, in fact…it just takes some leg work.

I gotta be honest: it is exciting being a marketer right now. There is so much un-chartered territory for small to medium sized businesses! The little guy can make a huge mark in a very short period of time with some professional help! But, sadly, the world of the unknown and unfamiliar will stop many business owners from making these investments online, and quite possibly miss the gold rush because of it.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the newest fad. No, this is how the world communicates now. Bring your business up to speed and do it quickly before your competitors do. It’s easier to get ahead now then play catch-up later.

Contact Innovated Media today – don’t wait!

Tags: advertising, Innovated Media, Internet Marketing, Internet marketing tulsa, marketing, ROI, Web Design
Posted in Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, advertising, marketing | No Comments »

Your Homepage No Longer Does the Heavy Lifting

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Gone are the days of the homepage. True, every website has one, but the days when website owners expect their homepage to do all the heavy lifting are gone.

Thanks to the evolving science of search, the search engines have made our lives easier by providing the consumer with relevant search results for specific keyword queries. Visitors now stream directly into websites via side doors and back doors. They can magically teleport into a website without ever seeing the homepage; they are practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.

For a consumer looking for a specific product or service, this is fantastic, but for site owners and operators, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you would potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified considerably. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around. The same thought and energy you put into the homepage of the site to brand the product or company must be put into each page that you intend to be searchable for the consumers that you want to be on your site.

Like I said, gone are the days when a website’s homepage could be counted on to do the heavy lifting. Now, all search-findable pages must be counted upon to do the lifting all by themselves. This involves a lot of research, work, and someone that knows what they are doing.

It is for this reason that my heart sinks when a growing business or ministry with lots of potential tells us “thank you for the proposal, but my nephew said he is learning web design and he is going to do our website.” BIG mistake. BIIIIIIIIG mistake.

I’m glad that your nephew is learning web design, but VERY rarely, and I do mean VERY rarely will you find a single person that is good at designing the layout of a new site, building it from the ground up using the most current and fastest-loading code, optimizing the site based on actual keyword and phrase research, and launching a full-blown internet marketing campaign based on the most current and ever changing search engine algorithms. This process is not one person’s job: it takes a team of people to pull this off and to pull it off well.

If you are a business owner, a ministry leader, an entrepreneur, or someone that needs to be visible on the web, don’t go cheap. You get what you pay for! Five years ago it may have been okay to just have a website by someone that just figured out how to do it. Having a website is no longer the goal – the goal is USING the website to create leads and sales.

** This content was adapted from The Truth About Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb

Tags: advertising, Internet Marketing, Internet marketing tulsa, marketing, ROI, search engine optimization, search engine placement, SEO, Web Design
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized, Web Design, advertising, marketing | No Comments »

Social Media Replacing E-Mail?

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Social media has its place, but does that place include replacing our most beloved forms of digital communication: e-mail?

1. Never underestimate the power of the hand-written note or letter. Test this in your work place. Put up a memo in your office, and write something in your own handwriting in red that says, “the power of the hand-written note reaches more people than a typed letter with the most impressive grammar.” I promise they will glance down at the bottom to read the handwriting before the read the first word of the memo. They’ll get the point.

2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (such as Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well.

3. Email notifies you of updates from all social networks you are a part of. Some people turn this feature off, but I particularly like it. I believe one of the forces of social media is that it is uniquely designed to come to you, the user. If I didn’t get a notification from Facebook in my e-mail, I wouldn’t get on Facebook on my iPhone at the stoplight. Facebook is an excellent tool to network with other professionals and friends, but it can eat up time in a busy schedule. I don’t see the merit in spending time on it unless I am directly connecting with someone in my network. But that’s just me. I like it to come to me (via email).

4. What about e-mail marketing? Hey, if I’m gonna get mail from someone I have no interest in, I’d rather get it digitally so I can just delete it. Better for the environment! Plus, we’ve achieved pretty good results with e-mail marketing. It is a very viable way to communicate to a busy audience, and it does generate leads and sales. People gotta have e-mail for this!

5. Email is universal, and social networks are not. Nearly everybody on the web (while there are no doubt some exceptions) has an email address. Many places of employment give employees email addresses when they begin working there. Meanwhile, a great deal of these companies are banning workers from even accessing social networks.

6. There are plenty of people who have no interest in joining social networks. Frequent news stories about security, privacy, and reputation issues do not help convince them.

7. Email is still improving. It hasn’t screeched to a halt with the rise of social media. There is still innovation going on, and integration with social media. Look at how Google is constantly adding new features to Gmail. Look at the new Yahoo Mail.

8. Even social networks themselves recognize the importance of email. Never mind that they update users about community-driven happenings via email. MySpace (still one of the biggest social networks) even launched its own email service recently.

9. More social media use means more email use. Look at these recent findings from Nielsen. The people consuming the largest amount of social media are also the people consuming the largest amount of email.

10. As far as marketing is concerned, email is doing pretty well, as many companies continue to struggle to find the right social media strategy to suit their needs.

You’ll have to decide for yourself, but in the world that we live in, a short pencil is better than a long memory. There are so many moving parts to how we communicate and perform our duties behind our desks, etc., that having a record of the conversations that you have with clients, coworkers, and friends is invaluable – especially when it can fit in your pocket on your mobile device. Which I hope is an iPhone or I honestly don’t see how you sleep at night.

Tags: E-mail Marketing, Innovated Media, Internet Marketing, marketing, Social Media, social technology, technology
Posted in E-mail, E-mail Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, marketing | No Comments »