Internet Strategies

A business-specific Pinterest account can be a valuable part of your social media strategy, if you set it up correctly. Here are the key steps to take in order to create a business-specific Pinterest account that can be used to generate leads, build a customer community, and raise your brand awareness. Once your account is established, you can follow the business-specific tutorials on the Pinterest site to master Pinterest marketing.

Convert an existing account

Early Pinterest adopters may have created a personal account on behalf of their business. To convert this personal account to a business account, after logging in, you merely need to click on the “Convert” button on the Pinterest business page. You will need to select the type of business that you are in, add your contact information, add your business name, and agree to the business-specific terms of service.

Create a new account

If you do not already have a personal Pinterest account, or want to keep your personal account personal and create another account for your business, you will need to create a business-specific Pinterest account. Go directly to the Pinterest business page and click on “Join as a Business”. Choose your user name, select the type of business that you are in, add your contact information, add your business name, and agree to the business-specific terms of service.

Verify your website

The point of the Pinterest account is to drive traffic and sales leads back to your main website, so you will want to have your website verified by Pinterest. To do this, you can either upload a verification file to your website’s root directory or include a meta tag on all of your website’s pages. WordPress websites can easily include the meta tag to the header field of their theme, while custom developed websites will probably prefer to upload the verification file rather than change every page of the site.

Customise your account

Whether you created a brand new account or converted an existing account, you will want to customise it for your business. Modify your profile, and include a new header image that matches the header image you use for other social media platforms. Add your verified website, as well as links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Include a short company biography similar to what you have on the About section of your Facebook page.

Keyword optimise your account

Create a Pinterest board matching every keyword for which you want your account optimised. To easily add pictures to your boards, install the Pin It bookmarklet to your Internet browser. Then, whenever you come across something that you think your target market will find useful or interesting, you can pin it to the relevant board. Track the number of repins you are getting to fine tune your strategy for what will make the best pins.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

In the online world, your reputation is everything. A new company with some whiz-bang products or services can make a big splash, but as soon as product or service reviews start hitting the social media, there is little that a company can do to counter a bad offering, no matter how big their advertising budget is. Unfortunately, competitors realise this, and unscrupulous ones may create false reviews in the hopes of tarnishing your reputation. There are also a certain percentage of people who will give you bad reviews without ever having used your product or service, simply because it reminds them of another product or service they used in the past with which they were dissatisfied. The good news is, however, that this is a situation you can fix.

Turn unhappy customers into fans

The easiest way to ensure people do not find bad reviews of your goods or services is to make excellent products and have exemplary customer service. However, even the best companies make the occasional mistake. By monitoring the major social media platforms for use of your company or product names, you can find disgruntled customers while there is still time to salvage the relationship. Take steps to satisfy them, and they’re likely to post equally glowing comments or blog entries about your excellent customer service. Make it easy for happy customers to write positive reviews about you by including links to review sites in your confirmation emails.

Monitor your appearance

If your product is easily recognisable from a photograph, do regular searches of the Internet to ensure it is not being used in inappropriate ways. Use the Facebook photo searching capabilities to locate photos that people have tagged with your company or product name, and remove the tag of any that are unflattering. If your company has a widely recognised President or CEO, you should search on that name, as well. Similarly, make sure that any publicly accessible photographs posted by employees, even if the photographs are posted on their personal Facebook accounts, do not tag the company or products in an unfavourable light.

Create a positive reputation

Using standard SEO practices, you can ensure that the first page of results returned in a search for your company or product names are pages featuring positive reviews, pages sponsored by your company, or places where your products can be purchased. If necessary, you can even create pages with your product name and a derogatory word such as “scam” or “problems” that will match that phrase for search engine results. However the content of the page will be that the product is not a scam or has only insignificant problems. Unscrupulous businesses whose products really are scams or have major problems sometimes use this methodology to temporarily paper over the bad publicity, although the reaction to an attempted cover-up is usually far worse than the reaction to the bad product. Therefore, if you create pages in this manner, make sure they do not give the impression of being unscrupulous.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Every so often I stumble across a word that’s special. One such word is disintermediation. In plain English, it means getting rid of the middleman. That’s what most internet businesses that sell physical products do, and you need to understand the process for your marketing strategy.

Examples of disintermediation

Look at Amazon. They ate the lunches of traditional booksellers. How? By seeing that there was no real need for brick and mortar stores with their expensive overhead for rent, utilities, personnel, and inventories of books. All of that translated into savings, savings that Amazon has shared with its customers to their mutual advantage. You could find countless examples of this. E-bay is explicitly built on this very principle.

There are countless ways a company could perform this service. And be sure, if you aren’t the one figuring this out for your industry, someone else is and they’ll be eating your lunch soon.

A constant process

Marketers always need to remember that customers don’t care about them. Not really. Remember the cult of Apple? Samsung is now eating their lunch, at least in smartphones. What customers care about is the experience you deliver to them. Your marketing needs to be thought of in that light. What good is it to reach out and corral 100 new customers if 50 of them are going to be dissatisfied or worse, seek a refund and bad mouth you?

The good news is that there are tools and resources out there so you can get help doing what needs done and doing it right. There are many software services you can use, often free, that will greatly simplify your business.

Two ways of looking at disintermediation

You actually need to look at disintermediation two ways. Yes, there is the customer side of the equation, as discussed before. But there is also your own side. Consider for example the hiring of services. For your business doing internet marketing you do not need to hire employees with all of the attendant costs and difficulties. You can contract people from around the world at lower prices to do projects to your standards. You keep using them if and when they suit you.

In this manner there’s a kind of balance established. Yes, you will have to cut your margins to compete in offering whatever you sell, but whatever resources you use to make and deliver it are getting cheaper and more efficient too.

Tips for effective disintermediation

So, recognising the reality here is necessary to your success and maybe your survival. Here are a few takeaway tips. Look broadly at options for getting work done. There are many more and better options today than even 10 years ago. By the same token, keep a very open and inquisitive mind as to how to things get done. You may not need a person at all. Many things are now automated, even things requiring professional results, like creating legal contracts. Even when not automated, most things can be done just as well via the Internet by someone who is eager and skilled as by someone local. You’re still getting rid of the middleman–in this case, distance.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Stock Xchng)

There is a story about a professor who started his class by placing a large glass jar on the podium, and put a number of large rocks into the jar, until no more would fit. When he asked, the students responded that it was full – he could not put any more rocks into the jar. The professor took a number of smaller rocks from beneath the podium, and dropped them into the jar, where they settled into the spaces around the larger rocks. He repeated this with pebbles, and then sand. When the students responded that this time, they were certain the jar was full and no more could be added, the professor poured water into the jar. What does this have to do with Internet marketing? There will always be activities you can do online to market your business or products. How do you know if you’re choosing the big rocks that will give you the most pay-off, or allowing your days to be filled with sand?

Big rocks

Your big rocks are those activities with a hard deadline, either because they are tied to a specific holiday, or because you are doing them in conjunction with another business and both of you must roll out the marketing activity at the same time. Put these activities on your calendar first, determining both when you will actually send out your email marketing, blog posts, ads, or website updates, and how long it will take you to create the material you will be sending out. Make sure that you budget in time for reviews if you are working with someone else.

Small rocks

The small rocks are those activities with soft deadlines. You’d like to complete them by a certain date, but if they’re done a day or two earlier or later, it won’t be a crisis. Add these activities to your calendar next.

Pebbles

Your pebbles are projects that do not have deadlines. These can be sample projects for new forms of social media, split tests to refine a marketing message, or other useful but not necessary activities. You can schedule these things on your calendar, or you can keep a to-do list of the most promising projects and schedule time to work on your to-do list.

Sand

Your sand is composed of many, many grains of small effort that together have an impact. Most social media activities fall under the heading of sand. Any one individual post or response will be unlikely to make a difference to your bottom line, but over time, they can have a great effect. Set aside a block of time each day to work on social media, or use small chunks of time in between other tasks.

Water

The water in this analogy is your relationships. It permeates everything else that you do, and is ignored at your peril.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

The centrepiece of many Internet marketing strategies is a consistent, well-written blog. By producing content that is tied to your marketing message, that answers a need your customers have, and that is optimised for the search engine terms that your customers are using, you can strengthen your marketing message while improving your status as the go-to expert in the eyes of your customers, and attract new customers who are searching for answers to their problems that you can answer.

But a blog alone is only part of a marketing strategy. You can vastly increase the power and reach of your blog by integrating it with other forms of media.

Facebook and Twitter

When your blog post goes out, you should also link to your blog from both your Facebook and your Twitter accounts. These should not be the only posts from either Facebook or Twitter, which have their own marketing plans to maximise the value you get from them. However, it is important that your blog posts be both presented to your Fans and Followers, and that your blog posts receive backlinks from your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Google+ Local

You can also link to your blog post from your Google+ Local page. This will directly impact Google’s view of how interactive your Google+ Local page is, which may improve your position in the local search engine results. It certainly won’t hurt. Like Facebook and Twitter, you will also be giving your blog posts valuable backlinks.

YouTube

You can read the text of your blog post, as a voiceover on top of a slideshow or as a how-to demonstration, depending on the particular content. The video can be released on your YouTube channel, optimised for the search engine terms of your choice, and linking back to your original blog post. Since YouTube is highly ranked as an authority source by the search engines, especially Google, which owns it, backlinks from YouTube will be extremely powerful for your blog posts. Your YouTube videos may also place highly in search results on their own, attracting more customers.

Article Marketing

While this may not be as useful for opinion piece blogs, if your blogs are highly information oriented or consist of how-to information, they can easily be repurposed as articles. Rewrite them, or run them through spinning software, so that they are unique, and repurpose them as articles, with information about your business and backlinks to your website at the bottom. Then submit the articles to an article sharing service which will allow other people to use the content in their newsletters and websites, giving you appropriate credit and backlinks.

Using this integrated strategy, one blog post can become a powerhouse of social media activity and authority backlinks.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

The increasing market penetration of the smart phone has once again totally changed the way that consumers interact with the market place. Online marketing has always represented an opportunity, but the mobile phone has made it more important than ever. Mobile browsers are more common than ever, and the way they use mobile browsing is also transforming. Where once mobile browsing was a strictly business tool, today it is also a shopping and socialising tool. Mobile browsers use cell phones to look for local stores. Where the Internet has historically been used to advertise businesses that predominantly sell online, it must now be used by small local businesses as well.

Use the Internet to Stay Visible

A display window is a good start when marketing to the general public; however, it is no longer enough. With more people using the Internet to pre-shop than ever it is crucial that you maintain a visible presence online. Most businesses gain 80% of their total sales from repeat business, which still leaves plenty of room for expansion with new customers. To bring new consumers through the door you will need to be visible to them. Locals may walk by your shop and see your display window, but that limits your opportunities with people further afield. A careful maximisation of your online presence can be the difference between expanding your new business and relying only on existing customers. There are several ways to make online advertising effective for your local business.

Update local listings, so that your business will show up when searched online. The more listings you keep updated, the easier it will be for consumers to find your business when they are looking for items you sell.
Choose thoughtful keywords. Keywords are what will drive business to your site. Make sure that your keywords are an accurate representation of what you sell, so that consumers come back again and again.
Post your sales. Many consumers comparison shop online before buying in store. This means that failing to post your sale prices could send consumers to a competitor, even when you have the lowest price.
Maintain your website. If you fail to update your website on a regular basis you lose customers. People shop for new things, and when your website does not put up new items people stop checking and move onto something else.

How Mobile Users Browse

To make the most of the online opportunity it is crucial that you list your company in every possible location. Many people will run searches on their phones to find a location that is convenient to make their purchases. Mobile users are often in a hurry and place convenience over price. If you are not advertising online you risk losing out on that business. Unlike other internet searches, mobile browsers convert to purchasers almost two thirds of the time. No other marketing method has that kind of turnaround.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

In the United States, the Monday after the holiday Thanksgiving represents a huge shopping day. Prior to the Internet, the single biggest sales day for American businesses was the Friday after the Thursday of the holiday. Now, online businesses enjoy the benefits of Cyber Monday. The black Friday sales that businesses offered mainly to American consumers can now be expanded to additional audiences. Consumers do not make the same distinctions when purchasing online, after all, you do not need to worry about transportation back and forth when purchasing online. The location of seller only matters with regards to shipping times. As long as the item can arrive timely for the holidays, it does not matter where the retailer is physically located. Below are some strategies you can use to improve your year end sales figures by being competitive on Cyber Monday.

Holiday Profits are all about Sales Figures

You are looking to sell more units at lower cost to you than ever, and the consumer wants to buy at the lowest cost available. Consumers are often price driven when they are shopping online. The best way to get the maximum number of sales on a unit is to offer the lowest price. You can not do this with every item in your online store, but strategic popular item discounts can help you leverage additional sales. The direct sale of a deeply discounted item may not earn you much, if any profits, but the additional accessory sales can be highly profitable. Do not be afraid to offer deep discounts on a limited number of products, it can help bring people onto your site.

Up Sells are the Key to High Holiday Profits

The fierce competition on prices and consumers makes it imperative that you offer a few items at the absolute lowest price available. Sure, you may even take a loss on some items, but the increased web traffic is worth the additional cost. After all, you will only have so many units in stock at the designated low price. After the site traffic picks up, you will need creative upsells and alternatives to keep consumers coming back to your site. Electronics are usually the big ticket discount item, but consider potential accessory gifts that can help you turn a tidy profit. With television sales, wireless noise cancelling headphones make a great gift accessory. Small electronics often do better when purchased in conjunction with a case, and portable electronics might benefit from a tag to help find the device at all times. Carefully implement creative upsells, to get the largest return on your holiday sales.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

The holidays are a time when many people spend a bit more than they should. The joy of gift giving during the Christmas season makes people dig a little deeper when shopping. Physical store locations create beautiful window displays that capitalize on the season. Online sellers should do to same. Integrating Christmas imagery in your existing sales website can help you to increase your sales this holiday season. There are several different ways to add a Christmas feel to your site, and you should employ them all.

Change the overall theme – most websites are designed so that certain elements remain the same from page to page. This is referred to as the theme of the site. Change the theme to reflect a holiday spirit, to get shoppers in the right frame of mind. Christmas imagery like decorations, wrapped presents, holiday lights or a Christmas tree are all possible examples.
Place sale items in the forefront – make sure to highlight your sale items and include information about their potential as gifts. Draw a strong connection between your sale items and holiday giving.
Colour scheme is crucial – any other time of the year, a subdued colour palate can be used to create a feeling of warmth, but for Christmas, bright colours act as an attraction. You do not need to stick with traditional red and green, but bright colours that compliment each other are a must.
Create a Christmas logo – while all of your products should be sold under your regular logo, a special holiday design can capture imaginations. Many large retailers use a different holiday exclusive design each year. Stay on top of trends and find something that tickles the funny bone or warms the heart of the average consumer.
Offer services specific to the holiday – including services like gift wrapping and drop shipping are a solid choice as part of your holiday campaign. Include vivid advertisements that demonstrate the ease of shopping on your site. Let consumers know that your site is truly a one stop shopping location.

These strategies can help to boost final quarter sales by encouraging additional holiday spending. Giving consumers a visual reminder of the season and using subtle reinforcement like the overall colour scheme and logo design will help put them in the shopping mood. You can not give them the opportunity to hold a product prior to purchase, but you can give them a festive atmosphere in which to shop. Thoughtful use of animations is a great addition to any holiday website, and paying attention to the hot gifts of the season will help you to determine the best items to put up for sale.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

I am sure you’re on other marketers’ email lists that pitch products that promise the following:

“Make $3253.33 Per Day By Pushing A Button!”

“How To Make An Easy $35,343/Month With No Work!”

How To Rake In $342/Day While You Sleep On Autopilot!”

These are considered to be “shiny objects” – the next new system, tweak, or loophole that promise riches without any work or effort.

The truth is a REAL internet marketing business that is going to reward your family for years to come requires effort and time. And it isn’t a “get rich quick” solution.

But the best part is the effort it takes to create an internet marketing business is nothing compared to the effort required to start a physical brick-and-mortar business. You can get started in several month with very little money relative to a brick and mortar business.

But one thing it is NOT is a business where you get up and suddenly find money in your bank account.

Very often beginner marketers are tempted by these “shiny objects” thanks to the latest product launch. They are constantly looking for that next “big thing” that’s going to shovel cash into their bank account.

One thing I will implore you to do is to choose a course regarding how to start an internet business and stick with it. You’ll be tempted by all kinds of “shiny objects” upon your internet marketing journey., but if you stay the course and resist, you will be rewarded.

Of course, there are courses and products out there that teach critical internet marketing principles that do bring value. These can shortcut your learning curve–as if you went to school to learn a trade.

I’m talking about “magic boxes” that promise to bring instant riches.

So when you see these “shiny objects” run, don’t walk. Stay away from get rich quick schemes that promise the world without any work on your part. Your wallet will thank you.

Live, Love Laugh

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy

There are very few business models in internet marketing where you can make a sale and get paid over and over again for it.

This is especially true with the continuity/membership model.

In case you are not familiar with this model, it’s with you offer a membership-style service where the customer has to pay a fee to get continued service.

I am sure you’ve subscribed to a magazine or cable television. This is an example of a continuity-based service. You only had to sign up once but you had to keep paying in order to get the service over and over again.

The best part about the continuity model is you get paid over and over again. Whereas if you were selling a single product, you would have to keep driving traffic and getting individual sales in order to maintain a stable income.

Here are some ways you can implement continuity into your business:

1) Membership sites

This is a good one. There are a lot of membership sites out there that serve protected content only to subscribers. People pay a subscription to join the membership and they have to keep paying in order to keep getting the content.

The downside is you have to keep creating new content over and over again to maintain members. But the fact most members will stay with your membership for 3-4 months (possibly more) makes updating site content more than worth it.

2) A newsletter

There are a lot of newsletters out there that are delivered weekly or monthly — depending on the market and type of content. There are a lot of financial newsletters people pay a good three figures to stay members!

The newsletter could be a print newsletter or an e-newsletter where people have to pay a subscription to get access. This means more money in your pocket as you only have to sell the newsletter once and people will keep paying you over and over again to stay members!

3) A service that is recurring by nature

There are dry-cleaning services and lawn moving services that offer a continuity program. That’s because people need these services over and over again and are perfect businesses that can thrive on the continuity model.

So think to yourself: How can I implement continuity into my business. Can I offer a membership site only for exclusive members? How about a newsletter? If you can do it, you’ll be tapping into the power of resdual income–perhaps the best type of income out there.

Keep Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy