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Internet Marketing is a confusing concept

Marketing gets more complicated and confusing everyday. A big part of this complication is caused by the many components and definitions of Internet marketing. Understanding which definition fits your business and then selecting the right platforms to use and what to do with them once you build your presence can raise the blood pressure in the best of us. So how can we be effective with our online marketing when we are trying to manage the daily operations?

Let’s take a look at two definitions of Internet marketing.

1. As a business model – building a business that uses the Internet as the primary sales tool, enabling you to sell goods, services, or advertising over the Internet.
2. As a channel of communication – using this new media channel to communicate a company’s message about itself, its products, or its services to gain visibility and establish an expert reputation.

Which one of these descriptions fits your needs depends on your business model.

Internet Marketing as a Channel of Communication

There are many strategies available within the umbrella term of Internet marketing and choosing the right set of strategies and activities is dependent on your resources, your target market and your goals. All of the following are possible Internet marketing strategies:

Internet Marketing – Channel of Communication

• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Local search marketing
• Social media marketing
• Internet advertising
• Mobile marketing

Every business benefits from being online and increasing their visibility to their target audience. Although these are all viable options in your marketing plan, not all of these strategies will apply.

To avoid marketing paralysis and keep you moving forward, here are three tips to help you stay sane.

• Internet marketing is not a replacement for marketing basics – it’s a collection of strategies that can help you reach your target prospect with your messages. If you view Internet marketing as simply another tool in your marketing toolbox, then you reduce your anxiety and can apply your marketing basics: who is my target audience, where can I find them and why would they want to connect and do business with my company?
• Internet marketing is not a quest for the most likes, followers and friends – it’s about building relationships and gaining visibility within your target market. For some reason, it is human nature for people to check out your company profile on Facebook or Twitter and instantly judge you based on the number of followers you’ve acquired. But having a lot of fake or uninterested followers does not help your business. So although growing your Facebook fans or Twitter followers organically seems tedious, keep in mind that those who choose to follow you may actually care about and support your business.
• Internet marketing is not about chasing the next New Shiny Object – it’s about creating  a plan that can adapt to changes as the Internet evolves and fits your specific needs and overall marketing strategy. Not every new and improved online tool will do this. Having a trusted marketing advisor can also help you make smart decisions on what to add to your plan and when so you can focus on your base business, which is what you do best as a local business owner.

Internet Marketing as a Business Model

Internet Marketing – Business Model

Developing a plan for a business that uses the Internet to generate profits and revenue is attractive to many. The promises of earning six figures by promoting other company’s products or services is too good to pass up. But in reality, making money solely by selling products and services on the Internet takes a lot of work, a keen understanding of your target market and a series of strategies to attract the buyer and convert them into a customer.

In other words, it’s really hard and requires an understanding of, you guessed it, marketing!

There are several types of Internet marketing business models that you could consider if you wish to earn a living on the Internet, including many ways to monetize your website. Being successful requires that you build extensive traffic in a particular niche so that you can attract advertisers interested in reaching that market. If you choose to go this route, you will need to master many of the strategies that were defined previously.

Which One is Right for You?

Determining the Internet marketing strategy that applies to your business is based on whether you are using the Internet as a primary sales tool or a communication tool.

How are you using Internet marketing for your business?

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Waiting for perfection results in lost opportunities

As a perfectionist myself, I know it is hard to hit the publish button on a web page or post. I research, write, proof-read, edit, re-write, proof-read … you get the point. However, waiting for website perfection can actually hurt a small business.

When all we had were print media for our marketing and sales tools, we had to ensure everything was perfect because once it is printed, you can’t easily change it and the cost of doing so is prohibitive.

The beauty of marketing on the web is the fluid nature of the channel. We have the ability to evolve our web presence as we evolve our businesses. We can write and publish our content and continue to strengthen our messages as we learn what our target audience wants or needs. We can create offers, try them and if they don’t work, change as necessary. We are no longer on that elusive quest for website perfection where every page meets the high standards we set for ourselves. Plus website perfection may be completely unachievable because you need to continually update, change and freshen your content in order to stay relevant to your market and to the search engines.

Don’t wait for perfection! Take action, stop procrastinating and get your message out to your target audience. Keep working your message and offers until they produce the results you want.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that it’s OK to use bad grammar or publish content with many typos. It’s also not OK to publish content that is not targeted, doesn’t include a call to action and leaves the reader confused. You still need to project an intelligent, professional image.

What Do You Lose by Waiting for Website Perfection?

• Lost opportunities – The longer you wait, you miss opportunities to be found. Search engines need time to index and move your pages up in the rankings. Search engines also need content to use to determine what the page should be ranked for and whether it is quality content. By waiting, search engines can’t get started indexing your website and you let your competitors beat you by getting there first and getting higher rankings.
• Lost revenue – When you get found, you have better opportunity for people to hire you / pay you for your products and services. It is better to put up your pages live and capture revenue opportunities by connecting with those who connect with your content. You can then get feedback and tweak, adding images and elements to the page to have a visual attraction.

Website Evolution is Inevitable

You are never sure what will resonate with your target so experiment. With WordPress, making changes to your content, your message, and how content can be laid out is easy. Move things around, reword your call to action and juggle your widgets to see what happens. Spending a lot of time and money on creating the “perfect website” before you know what your target audience will connect with is just not worth it.

My advice to small business owners is to get out there and become visible. Use your website to research what works, what your target audience wants and adjust as necessary. Waiting for website perfection before you venture out onto the Internet does not have any advantages and in fact, will cost your business in the long run.

Leave perfection to the Olympic athletes. The perfect performance and perfect score is their goal and for those competing, it is expected. For those of us running a small business, our main goal is to grow our revenue and profits.

What is your view on waiting for perfection in your business?

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/website-perfection-lost-opportunities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=website-perfection-lost-opportunities

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WordPress SEO Plugin – Simplifies Content Optimization

Small business owners really don’t need one more thing to think about when it comes to online marketing. To add anything else to our already overflowing plates will make us ineffective. But small businesses, regardless of their industry, should add a blog as the central component of their content marketing activities because creating relevant content for your target audience and optimizing it for search engine visibility is too important to ignore.

Optimizing Your Web Content

For the sake of simplicity, let’s view search engine optimization as two components: what you do on your website to help search engines and what you do outside of your website to build quality links. Optimizing your content for each page of your website, including your blog posts, is essential to helping your site get found.

Good content marketing requires that you understand your target customer’s needs and then develop content to help them discover why they should buy your products and services. Effective use of keywords in content marketing makes your content more relevant to your target while helping search engines optimize the content.

Content optimization is made simpler by the  WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. In a recent update, new enhancements that make analysis more visual make this plugin a time saver. Joost de Valk, the developer of this plugin and expert on SEO, explains the plugin thoroughly in his post. However, there are some nice features that I’d like to point out.

WordPress SEO – Guided On Page Optimization

One thing I’ve always liked about WordPress SEO is that it guides you on where to focus in order to best optimize each page of your website. By selecting one keyword on which to base your writing, you create better, more relevant content for your reader while helping the search engines do their jobs.

The WordPress SEO plugin gives you three tabs to help with the SEO process. The first, shown below, enables you to select your focus keyword, write your SEO Title (what appears at the top of your browser) and your Meta Description. The SEO Title and Meta Description create the snippet that will appear in the search engine results pages. If you choose a focus keyword, the plugin gives you information on whether you have used the keyword in the right places.

WordPress SEO Plugin – General Screen

The page analysis tab highlights key optimization areas and provides insight into how well your page is optimized. The icons on the left are red, yellow and green depending on whether you have met the suggested criteria for well optimized web pages.

WordPress SEO – Page Analysis

In the Advanced tab, you can set various index and follow options to guide the search engines. It also includes a 301 redirect capability in the event you want to remove a page and point the URL to one that is active. Mostly you can leave the settings as defined in the WordPress SEO plugin settings, but these are good to have if you need to create an exception.

WordPress SEO – Advanced Tab

Visual Triggers to Keep Your SEO on Track

In the new release, there are now more visual triggers to help you get the most from your content. In the publish box of your WordPress dashboard is a little indicator that is red, yellow or green depending on whether the page has met the criteria.

WordPress SEO – Publish Box Indicator

That same indicator is also shown on the Admin bar when viewing a page on your live site.

WordPress SEO – Admin Bar

And where I really like the changes is in the list of pages and post. The plugin has added three columns to show the Title, Meta Description and the Focus Keyword that you used. This is a great reminder in case you forget to optimize the page or post. If the area is blank or the SEO indicator is gray, you need to do some work.

WordPress SEO – Page and Post List

All of these new reminders keep SEO very visible. Each post can be optimized as you write it, but I bet your pages have not been reviewed in a while. Check your list of pages and see which ones you need to work on.

On page SEO is important but in my experience, it is too easy to overlook because of all the details. Most small business owners have enough on their task lists and SEO is one that never rises to the top. However, now with this plugin, whether or not your content is optimized is very visible. Look at SEO as a challenge to turn your indicator from red to green.

What do you think of this new update to the WordPress SEO plugin?

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/wordpress-seo-simplifies-content-optimization/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-seo-simplifies-content-optimization

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6 Hot Marketing Tips to Keep Your Inbound Marketing on Track this Summer

“Summertime and the livin’ is easy …” – The lyrics from George Gershwin’s Summertime remind us that we should kick back and take some time off, enjoy our family and friends, golf, go to the beach and basically just have fun.

But should we take time off from continuing our  inbound marketing efforts during these hot summer months? Heck no! Taking a break could be the kiss of death for your small business. Even if you are busy now, consistently executing your inbound marketing is essential to keep your pipeline full of prospects.

The following tips can help you keep your inbound marketing flowing when you would rather be on vacation or have some down time that you can take advantage of to be ready for September’s increase in activity.

• Plan Ahead – The content marketing component of inbound marketing is important to do regularly and consistently. If you have a content plan, create your content for a month in advance. Write your email newsletter and a month’s worth of blog posts and set the schedule to cover your time away so your subscribers never miss a beat. Having your content under control can make your time off much more enjoyable knowing your business is maintaining visibility while you are enjoying the beach.

• Automate – Automating your posts to social sites is not taboo and in fact, can make it seem like you’ve never gone on vacation! Although you probably can’t schedule a month of tweets or Facebook posts, you certainly can schedule several days worth when you are off getting rejuvenated at the beach. Scan your blog feeds a couple of evenings a week for content your audience will like and usie Buffer or HootSuite to schedule them to go out at the most appropriate times for your target audience.
• Get Temporary Help – Offload tasks to others by hiring quality help through Elance. Elance makes it easy to find quality freelancers that can help you with your marketing activities. A colleague of mine hired someone to create high quality, branded PowerPoint presentations. I’ve hired a blogger to write content for some of my clients. This frees me up to do more for my clients while giving me some down time to spend on the golf course.
• Evaluate your Web presence – Take advantage of this less crazy time and do a web presence analysis. If your business is not visible for your top keywords, put a plan in place to update the third component of inbound marketing, your search engine optimization. Include a review of your web content, looking for places that can be rewritten for specific keywords. This is a good time to focus your marketing on the things that can increase your visibility and expert reputation.
• Review your service offerings – If your business slows down this time of year, use the extra time to review your service offerings, add a new service or expand your existing services to provide more value. Kick back on your deck with your tablet and use Evernote to start jotting down ideas.
• Support mobile – Your customers and prospects are also taking time off but that doesn’t mean they are disconnected. Make sure your email marketing and website supports mobile devices. While on vacation, I see many people on their tablets, checking email and staying in touch. If your website isn’t easy to use with a table or smartphone, you could be driving your prospects and customers to your competition.

I will admit that it is very difficult to stay focused on your business when so many other things are calling your name! For us in the northeast, this great weather we’re having doesn’t last all year so we want to take advantage of every sunny day while we can. I would so love to golf more, head to the beach or just lay on my deck and relax over a good book. But I owe it to myself and my clients to stay visible and active during these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer!

What are your plans for inbound marketing while you are enjoying your summer vacation?

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Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/6-tips-to-keep-inbound-marketing-on-track/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=6-tips-to-keep-inbound-marketing-on-track

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There are many reasons I love WordPress, but the main reason is the simplicity of creating, updating and maintaining your site. WordPress keeps adding more and more powerful features, turning the platform into an effective content management system for small businesses. One of these powerful features is Custom Post Types, first introduced in WordPress 3.0, that allows you to create blocks of reusable content. This capability enables you to create, edit, and store information as you do with blog posts but with much more creative control.

WordPress comes standard with five post types that are used by default:

• Post – blog posts
• Page – static content pages
• Attachments – special post that holds information about files uploaded through the Media upload system
• Revisions – used to hold draft posts as well as any past revisions of existing posts or pages (on heavy blog sites, I use the Revision Control plugin to keep the database smaller for better performance)
• Nav Menus – holds information about a single item in the Navigation Menu system

Although most users of WordPress may never recognize the last three as post types, they are used by the system to manage the organization of your content.

Theme developers can now use custom post types to create an array of content that can be edited through the visual editor and used anywhere on the site. By using the more simple method of creating the content, users are able to do more without complexity.

Great examples of using WordPress custom post types include any website that needs a formatted post for displaying repeatable information such as a:

• Portfolio of images

• Product catalog
• Frequently asked questions
• And many more

Simplify Creating Custom Post Types

The WordPress plugin developers never cease to amaze me with their expertise. They turn something complex into an easy to use feature. There are many plugins that use the WordPress Custom Post Type, but the Custom Post Widget plugin is my new favorite and one to check out!

The Custom Post Widget allows you to set up content blocks that are easily edited without knowing HTML. Using this plugin, you can create the content once and use it in multiple areas of your site, including widget areas and pages and posts via a shortcode. The shortcode can be found by clicking an icon next to the Upload/Insert add media icon. Even though you give each custom content block a title, you can choose whether to use it, giving you flexibility in where you may need to use it.

Custom Post Types using WordPress Custom Post Widget Plugin

From the plugin author, other benefits to this plugin include:

• Makes widget content editable by users with editor rights, enabling more users to update all content.
• Keeps revisions of the content blocks to allow you to easily restore the content to a previous version.
• Enables users to use the WYSIWYG editor for editing the content and adding images.

Some ideas on using this plugin:

• Use the content block to create the information one time. This is especially good for signup forms, Facebook Like Box, social media icon links and other calls to action you want to sprinkle across your website. The screenshot shows my content block for my MailChimp signup form. Now if I change my form, I only need to do it once!
• Content you wish to include in various pages and posts. One that comes to mind is the boilerplate “About” information in press releases.

One thing to remember – a custom post type is still a post to many plugins so some things may get a bit strange on your website. For example, WordPress SEO does recognize the various post types and allows you to eliminate the SEO form from those types. However, some social share and author bio plugins do not and will display the buttons and author box on them. This can look rather strange when the content block is in a sidebar widget. Over time I expect most of the plugins will recognize the individual custom post types and give you an option to manage how they are used.

Are you using Custom Post Types? What are some good examples? Share your uses with us!

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/wordpress-custom-post-types/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-custom-post-types