Internet Strategy

More and more people are using mobile phones as their primary means to access the Internet. While once you only needed a mobile website if you were a restaurant or service provider whose number someone might be looking for, virtually all businesses must now be conscious of how their website appears on mobile devices. These seven secrets will help to ensure your mobile website is a success.

1. Divide and conquer

Your website is divided into zones or sections. You have a section of navigation, one or more sections of ads, a header section, and a content section. The more that you can divide your website into these different sections, the more control you have over the order in which those sections appear for your mobile website. If your navigation, ads, and content are all one big section, you will not be able to change their order of appearance to enhance the mobile experience.

2. Respond automatically

Many website templates are designed to be responsive. Responsive websites at a minimum allow the width of the website and the size of the text to be adjusted. WordPress-based websites can use plugins that detect whether the device viewing the website is a mobile device or not, and provide entirely different user interfaces for different devices.

3. Allow freedom of choice

Just because your visitor is using a mobile device, does not necessarily mean they want to be limited to the information available on your streamlined mobile website. Give them the option to view your regular website, and do not automatically send them back to the mobile version if you detect they are using a mobile device.

4. Target your audience

Use your website analytics to determine which devices your target audience uses, as well as which levels of operating system your target audience has installed upon those devices. Develop your mobile website with that operating system and device in mind, then test on all of the major devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows phones, with backward compatibility to the operating system versions still in use.

5. Use easily resizable text

Do not develop a Flash website, unless you want to develop a duplicate non-Flash website for mobile users. Avoid popup windows, fixed display widths, and floating images or text boxes. Popups are difficult to close on a mobile device, fixed display widths require scrolling back and forth to see the entire display, and floating images or text boxes that are insignificant on a computer screen can obscure most of the content on a mobile device.

6. Put your phone number in text

Mobile devices will convert any phone number into a click-to-call hot spot. However, this only works for text phone numbers. The mobile devices will not touch phone numbers that appear in graphics, depriving you of an easy way for potential customers to reach you.

7. Keep to one page

Have all of the content in an article available on a single page. That way, website visitors who start reading your content and then pass out of range of a signal will not be frustrated and unable to finish the content.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

We all know the main goal of an Internet marketing campaign is to generate traffic the converts to sales. Using SEO to optimise our presence online has been part of this for many years. Recently, the changes to Google’s algorithms made countless marketing coordinators wonder which way to go with SEO. SEO is a large part of the Internet marketing world. However, in order to be successful, you have to adjust your strategy and avoid common mistakes.

Keywords are the backbone of SEO. You have probably spent hours perusing key words and their popularity. You search for the right keywords to get your site recognized in organic searchers. The mistake many marketers make is misunderstanding how the public searches for their business. The average web query is straightforward words or questions. Once you understand this, your success in choosing keywords will increase.

Your organization might be the leading distributor of polyvinyl chloride products, but the general public is not going to search for that term, they are going to look for plastic. You have to get inside their thought process and figure out how they search the Internet.

There are people who literally ask Google what they want to know. This breaks keyword research down to the simplest possible ways of describing your business. In this example, plastic makers could be a key word.

Another common mistake I have seen in regards to SEO and keywords is a failure to do competitive keyword analysis. Google Tools, Hubspot’s Keywords Tool and other research tools are available to help you determine if you have the best keywords in your strategy and compare them to keywords being used by your competitors. You can lose position in the rankings quickly if you fail to evaluate keywords.

You need to make sure that you are monitoring your keyword strategy on a constant basis. Trends change constantly. What is popular today will be unpopular tomorrow. If you have a plan in place to monitor search trends, you can get ahead of the game. This is where many seasonal businesses experience shortfalls. They neglect to monitor trends and lose business. For example, many women start Christmas shopping and planning well before the fall season arrives. If you are monitoring your keywords, you will see this early and cash in on the increase in traffic.

The bottom line in SEO strategy and keywords comes down to research and monitoring trends. At one time, keyword stuffing worked for many websites. Today, you have to be smart and use them appropriately to achieve maximum conversion and increase your profitability.

If you have made mistakes using keywords your marketing strategy, I’d love to hear from you. Use our comments section to share the lesson you learned so we can all avoid costly keyword mistakes.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: WikiMedia Commons/Nedmarx)

A few months ago I introduced you to the social media site Pinterest. Today, I’d like to offer you three tips for how you can fully realise its potential as a marketing tool.

First, let me give you a brief refresher. Pinterest is a visual “pinboard” with more than 18.7 million unique visitors each month. It allows users to connect with one another via shared tastes and interests. They “pin” images and videos to pinboards that are generally identified by an idea or theme, such as travel or books. As a “pinner” one can create, collect, share, and repin images and videos in any of the 32 categories that Pinterest has set up.

Let’s get started.

Plan Your Pins Ahead

With so many possibilities, it’s tempting to just start pinning images from your site. Don’t. First make sure you’ve set up your account fully, filling out all the profile information and linking it to your Facebook and Twitter account in order to maximise exposure.

When setting up your pinboards, consider your customers or clients. What are the services or products that they will most likely search for? If you are a sports retailer, perhaps you’ll have pinboards for tennis and football and golf. If you’re a bookshop, perhaps your pinboards will be grouped by subject, such as Renaissance history and literature. If you’re a garden shop, you might have pinboards for herbs and perennials. Also, be creative in coming up with names for your boards. For example, don’t just call your board “Flowers,” call it “Bountiful Blooms!”

Make Your Pins Pop
The great thing about Pinterest is that an arresting image will get noticed and repinned thousands and thousands of times. In the language of the Internet, it will go viral. Pinterest is about the visual. It’s about that image that sticks with you long after you’ve moved on to something else, the one that makes you tell your friends what you saw.

In order to make your images pinnable, you need to find ways to highlight what you have to offer in the best way visually. Choose the best images from your site, or use one of the many tools available on the Internet to help you create them, including Pinstamatic, Snagit, and Pixir. Always make sure that the image you use is copyright-free.

Generally, the most engaging and repinned images on Pinterest are the ones that are the most simple. To go back to our bookshop example, maybe your pins aren’t images of each book’s cover. Perhaps, instead, you choose a line from the book and place it against a simple colored background; quotes are some of the most repinned pins on Pinterest.

Track Your Pinning Success
As with all of your social media efforts, you should track how well your Pinterest efforts are doing. When you log into Pinterest, a “Recent Activity” box will appear on the left of your screen, which will provide a breakdown of comments, likes, repins, and follows. Note the categories, keywords, and suchlike, that get the most activity and concentrate your efforts there.

The possibilities for Pinterest are endless. Happy pinning!

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

(Image by Raul P)

A website is the central hub of activity for your business. The majority of your marketing efforts are done in order to drive customers and potential customers to your website. The design of your website is extremely important. It is the digital representation of you, your business and the overall mission of your business. When individuals come to your website they want a few specific things. They want to find the specific information they are searching for to be found easily. They also want a clear call to action. Before you update your website, or even have your website initially built, it is important to avoid some common errors. These errors can cost business dollars if they are not avoided.

Your Website Shouldn’t Sing

When a person lands on your website are their ears overwhelmed by music that starts to play the instant the site opens up? There is nothing more frustrating than trying to find the volume control for your computer to stop the annoying music from blasting out of our computer. The truth is that when someone lands on your site and they hear immediate music, they will be clicking off your site quicker than you can blink. Great rule of thumb is to keep your site as a visual experience and leave the music for your iPod.

Direct Call To Action

Where do you want to drive your visitors? Are your products and services that are for sale clearly marked? Sites that are difficult to navigate will annoy 100% of those that visit your site. Your site may be the most visually exciting site in the world, but if you don’t tell your visitors where to go, you are left with a site that looks good but isn’t functional. Clearly mark on your website how to contact you and where products and services can be purchased.

Text Size & Color

I know you want to cram as much information as possible onto your website, but remember that less is more. Your visitors don’t want to spend hours reading your site. They have come to your site with a specific question or problem that needs to be addressed. Make it easy for them to see and find what they are looking for. Using a unique font, a smaller font size and a creative color for your font makes it difficult to read and navigate your site. Keep it simple. Use a standard font, in a standard color that is in a font size that is easy to read.

Creating a great website can be a costly investment for any business owner. If you have taken the time and energy, not to mention your hard earned money to create a great site, make sure you avoid the mistakes listed above. You want to keep your visitors on your site, not drive them away before they even get a chance to find what they were seeking.

Thanks!

Sean

(Image Creative Commons)

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

We are constantly reading blogs and reports on how to maximize Facebook and Twitter for your marketing efforts. While many of us thought that LinkedIn was simply a platform for business professionals, most of whom were seeking work, in the last few months LinkedIn has changed their game dramatically. For many marketers, having a LinkedIn presence can be extremely helpful for their business. How do you maximize your LinkedIn efforts, in a short amount of time, to see these benefits? Here are three quick tips to set you on your course.

Complete User Profile

We all know that individuals do business with people they know, like and trust. If your profile doesn’t properly reflect who you are and what your business represents, the people viewing your profile will quickly skip over yours and go on to the next. Take the time to fill out your profile and choose your copy carefully. In many cases you are making a first impression. You want that impression to be a good one.

Start and promote a group

If you are unable to find a group that reflects your business or your philosophy, simply create one. Creating a group will establish you as an expert in your field. You must keep your group active. Invite people you admire to your group and invite people you know to your group. Add discussions and offer relevant information that can be used by others. This is a great way to start the ball rolling on potential customers and creating joint ventures with businesses that mesh with your company.

Connect Your Accounts

LinkedIn offers the ability to link many of your accounts to your LinkedIn profile. This feature is often overlooked and it is a great way to drive traffic. If you want people to go to your website, add that link. If you want people to go to your blog, attach a blog rss feed. Another great tip is to link your twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. This allows a constant stream of new content to flow to your account. People will quickly learn that you are a valuable source of useful information and they will continue to visit your profile. They will also be more apt to visit your website or your blog if they feel that you are trustworthy.

LinkedIn is one of the most underutilized social media platforms of today. By taking the time to use LinkedIn effectively, you will find potential customers that you otherwise may not have reached. LinkedIn is also extremely valuable for staying on top of what is happening in your industry. You have the opportunity to connect with other experts while establishing yourself as the expert in your field.

Thanks!

Sean

(Image Creative Commons)

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

Ever wish that you could know the precise effect of given piece of advertising or a marketing campaign? Now you can, by using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a suite of website traffic analysis tools from Google. Quite frankly, if you’re not taking advantage of it, you’re missing a huge opportunity for increased marketing effectiveness. By some reports, as many as 50% of the top sites use it, including Twitter and MySpace.

Google Analytics tracks visitors to your site, and provides you with detailed information about which pages they looked at, how long they lingered on each page, and what they were looking for on your site.

Getting Started

Getting started with Google Analytics is incredibly simple. Start by heading over to their website, and setting up an analytics account. It’s free, you just need to register.

Then you’ll be provided with a snippet of code and instructions on how to input it into your site.

Analyzing Online Marketing Effectiveness

The first, and most obvious, use of Google Analytics is simply to track general campaign effectiveness. So after you make an advertising push, you can track its effectiveness by logging into Google Analytics and checking the change in your page visits. It will also track the changes over time, so you can evaluate the stickiness of your advertising.

Most importantly, all the data is recorded in an easy-to-use, visual format, so that you can quantify all your results.

The second use of Google Analytics is for much more detailed tracking. For instance, say you make a major advertising push, and you site hits are way up, but you don’t see much of a difference to your sales numbers.

You can use Analytics to go in and see what went wrong. So perhaps hits were way up on your landing page, your product information page, and your pricing page, but you didn’t have many more conversions. You can also glean valuable information from the time that your users spent on each page. For example, if they stayed on your product information page for 0:05, then you know they probably weren’t very interested. On the other hand, if they sat on your pricing page for a long time before deciding not to buy, then perhaps the price is just slightly too high, and a temporary sale could drive up sales numbers.

In this case, you can tell that your marketing campaign was successful in attracting attention, and that your customers are interested in your product, but that the price point is too high.

You can also glean valuable information from the time that your users spent on each page. For example, if they stayed on your product information page for 0:05, then you know they probably weren’t very interested. On the other hand, if they sat on your pricing page for a long time before deciding not to buy, then perhaps the price is just slightly too high, and a temporary sale could drive up sales numbers.

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool, and will work wonders to help you track and quantify the effects of your marketing campaigns. No top website should be without it.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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When people think about creating content for their business they often think about sitting at their keyboards slaving away for hours creating blog posts and articles.

However, there are several things you can do to create content while you are in “dead” time (like driving your car or doing something else that allows you to think).

1) Record a quick podcast.

Most people have smartphones that allow them to record voice. So why not use it to record a quick 10 to 15 minute podcast while you’re driving to the bank or grocery store?

You don’t have to have professional-quality audio or be in a studio when recording podcasts. Just pick up your cellphone, hit the RECORD button, and start creating content!

If you do not have a smartphone that records, you can buy a voice recorder for cheap at any office or electronics store. You can then take that audio (most voice recorders will export into mp3 format) and put it up as a podcast!

2) Dictate on the go.

If you have an iPhone, you can use a neat program called Dragon Dictate. It will actually transcribe everything you say into the phone into text. Of course you have to train it to learn your voice, and you have to speak clearly so the program can pick up your words.

But this is a good way to create content on the go if you want to create written content.

3) Record a video on the go.

Who says you have to be sitting at your computer in front of your webcam to create a video? You can use your cellphone or handheld camera you can get for under 100 pounds these days to create a quick video.

You viewers might consider these “off-the cuff” videos more authentic.

So there are several ways you can create content on the go. Don’t get bogged down by having the perfect equipment or presentation…the key is being consistent about delivering content to your target audience!

Live, Love, Laugh!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy

One of the best parts about the internet is there are many ways you can distribute content online. Most of the time, you can take a blog post or article and repurpose it over and over again.

Here are 5 ways you can repurpose a simple 500-word article.

1) Create a video and post it on Youtube.com

No, you do not have to be a professional cinematographer. If you have a webcam or a flip camera, then you’re all set. Just take your article and create a 1-4 minute video out of the content and post it on Youtube.

2) Record the audio and create a podcast.

Podcasting is becoming very popular. You can easily take your article and essentially read it into your computer to create a podcast version. All you need is a simple microphone and you’re all set.

3) Create a “mindmap” and post it on Flickr.com

You can also take the simple article and, with slight modifications, create a mindmap or process map and post it on Flickr. There are over 5 billion images on Flickr and you can get a lot of traffic on this site.

4) Create a slideshow and post it on Slideshare.com

This is becoming a very popular slide and presentation-sharing medium. You can even present the slideshow on Youtube.com.

5) Create a more “concentrated” version on Squidoo.com

You can take one concept you mentioned in your article and create a Squidoo lens on it. In general, it is a good idea not to publish the same article twice on the internet. Google will only index one version of the article, so it is better to create another related article and publish on the internet. It’s just a matter of taking an existing article and using it for ideas for other articles.

Live, Love, Laugh!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy

One very important tool to use in your marketing is surveys. This is an excellent way to determine what your target market wants.

Let’s say you want to sell a golf product. Yet you do not know what your market wants to know in the product. They might want to know how to hit longer drives or sink more putts. You are unsure.

So there is only one thing you can do: ASK Them!

There are 2 services you can use for this. The first one is askdatabase.com. This is a service that allows you to create simple survey pages…with readymade templates and a database to store your information.

You can also use surveymonkey.com. This is another excellent service as well. Of course, you can always just create a simple form on your website as well and have all the responses go to your email.

One simple thing you can do is ask just one question. The best format to do this is to ask the following:

“What is the most important thing that is holding you back from (insert benefit they want)?”

So for example, if you were selling a golf product, the question would be:

“What is the most important thing that is holding you back from playing better golf?”

The key is to get at least 30-50 responses. So if you have a good list you can send it out to your customers. Or you can drive traffic to the page through pay-per-click advertising and other traffic-driving methods. This is a good number to get so you can get enough responses to make a decision regarding how to set up your product.

All you have to do is look at the responses and take a look at the issue that is mentioned the most. For example, for the golf product, you might get a lot of responses regarding how to drive the golf ball better. This will give you a hint regarding how to create your next product!

The one common sin in marketing is trying to sell something the market doesn’t want. Driving traffic to a survey page boosts the chances you are creating a product that is going to get some sales since the market is telling you what they want!

Keep Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy

One of the biggest mistakes most beginning marketers make is choosing the wrong market. They have a hobby or interest they want to pursue but when they launch their product, they don’t make any money.

In my previous blog post here, we touched on the importance of search volume in Google and what those numbers really mean regarding whether or not people are going to actually pull out their wallet and buy something.

In this post, we are going to cover the 5 traits of a strong market. The best part is it only takes a couple hours or so to research all this to determine if your market is viable.

1) Are there real people selling real products in your market?

Find this out by going to Google and typing in the keyword for your niche. You should be seeing a lot of Google Adwords on the right hand side of the page. This is a sign that there is a good market–as most people are paying good money to advertise on Google.

2) Are there affiliate programs in your market?

Another technique to determine if there are buyers in your market is to type in your keyword followed by the word “affiliate”. This should bring up affiliate programs in your marketplace–a sure sign that money is to be made in your market.

3) Are there books on your subject being sold on Amazon.com?

Do a simple search on Amazon to determine if there are books in your niche. Better yet, go to your local bookstore. Are there a lot of them or only 1 or 2? This could be a sign that the market might not be as strong as you think.

4) Are there periodicals in your market?

An almost slam-dunk way to determine if there are buyers in your market is to determine if there are magazines or periodicals in your marketplace. The fact that people are willing to pay money to have a periodical sent to their door is a sure sign that market is ready to buy!

5) Are there advertisements in these periodicals?

When you look in magazines, is it full of direct response advertising? If this is the case, you will want to make note of that–as a sure sign of a vibrant market is seeing direct response advertising in offline periodicals.

Now not all markets are going to fulfill this criteria. However, if you have an idea and you come up blank in all of the above for your market, you better choose a new one!

Keep Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Internet Marketing Academy