Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’

« Older Entries

5 Ways to Create a Sustainable, Engaging Following on Facebook

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

As Facebook continues to take the social media marketing world by storm, many businesses are trying to figure out how they can develop a strong following that’s sustainable over the long term…what can brands do to emulate others’ success?

Below are five elements of a successful Facebook page from our friends at Mashable, who include some great examples of companies successful at Facebook marketing.

Integrating these tips into your social media marketing strategy can help you maximize the value of your Facebook page(s).

1. Network with other platforms

One way successful brands on Facebook got to where they are is by working in tandem with other platforms to drive visitors to their Facebook page. Many companies expect consumers to find their Facebook page automatically without adding links into their homepage. The result…most people are unable to find your page on the bustling social network.

Consumers should be able to easily find your Facebook page…whether it’s through a prominent link on your homepage or through other social networks like Twitter. Connecting multiple social platforms and a hub from the brand website can help funnel customers throughout your network.

2. Create a resource to target a new demographic

Many Facebook pages serve as a connection hub while others offer pertinent information to their customers. This information is used as an added value to have consumers create a connection with the brand.

These “Boxes” allow you to target specific demographics for your products and services outside of those who already know and love what you offer.

3. Have contests to boost user participation

Another way to engage potential customers is to offer contests and coupons. Many Facebook users do not simply join a page because they’re loyal to your brand. However, they may be motivated to join if they can get a coupon or enter into a contest and win something.

Offering something to consumers is one big way you can develop a large following. This can be a coupon, free shipping, weekly deals for Facebook fans and more.

4. Empower those who have pre-existing pages that feature your brand

There’s a chance a loyal customer has already created a Facebook ‘fan’ page for your products. One of the most fabled stories of a company who has successfully done this is Coca-Cola. What started out as a fan page for fun for a couple of Coke enthusiasts when on to become one of the most popular pages on Facebook.

Rather than coming in and taking over the page when the company decided to take Facebook on, they brought the enthusiasts to the Coca-Cola plant in Atlanta and gave them a tour. The two guys maintain control of the page but now have the blessing and financial support of the company…empowering these fans ensures a passionate commitment to the page’s success.

Therefore, it isn’t always the best idea to take over a Facebook page. Instead, reward the creator and make an even more enthusiastic customer who will spread that to others.

5. Be sure you’re targeting the right demographic

You may be trying everything you can to grow a following on Facebook but nothing ever happens. One reason is that you’re target demographic may not be on Facebook. Therefore, before you do anything, you need to find out if your target market hangs out on Facebook.

Research from Quantcast shows Facebook tends to skew toward younger females…53% of these women have kids and make over $60,000 per year. The demographic is changing too with older, more professional women joining up. The college market is pretty saturated.

Keep checking to monitor changes in the social network’s prime demographics and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Facebook has seen lots of positive growth over the last few years and is expected to continue its dominance of the social networking/marketing world. Besides great content on your site and blog, Facebook offers you a way to find more customers. Many people join Facebook pages because they have friends who “liked” a product.

Facebook is essentially a place people go to interact with their friends and see what they’re saying about certain things. Capturing this market can propel your company even farther in the online world.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Online Marketing, Tip of the Day | No Comments »

A Quick Link Building How-To for Small Businesses – Part I

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Pages within a website and across the Internet are connected through links. You have links on your website to navigate from one page to the next. You also have links to other sites you think your readers will find interesting. And finally, other sites will link to yours, providing Internet users one more way to find you.

While all three of these are important and impact search engine rankings in some way, the last type has the largest by far…which coincidentally, is the hardest links to control.

Basically speaking, the search engines’ concept is as follows: if high-quality sites are linking to yours, then your site must be pretty important and therefore, will be more inclined to show it higher in their results…you in effect receive “link juice” from other sites that link to you.

But it’s not enough to just get a couple of links and then sit still. Search engines like Google look at link patterns to your site as they build over time, not just a one-time snapshot.

So, building the right links in a consistent fashion can payoff tremendously – that much is clear. But how do I go about building strong inbound links without getting myself in trouble? Getting on Google’s blacklist isn’t much fun and hard to recover from.

Continue reading for one of the ways you can build high-quality links to your site naturally and check back again in a week for part II of our quick little link building how-to.

Variety is the spice of life – and links too!

There are all sorts of link farming schemes out there you can buy into – which is probably the first reason you should run away. This practice is known as reciprocal linking – you exchange links with other sites who will turn around and link to you on a mass scale…Google and others are on to this!

The key to successful link building is to cultivate a good mix of links over time.

Having 100 links with the same anchor-text doesn’t look natural to anyone, including search engines. When links come naturally, some may use your business name while others may use some kind of descriptive phrase for the anchor-text…they vary.

If anchor-text is the same for all links pointing to your site, it will be signal to the search engines that your links are being generated artificially, not naturally.

And consider the pages people are linking to and try to mix that up too…don’t have them all going to your homepage. Try to drive links to specific product pages, your blog, your press room, your articles and more. This will help get them ranking as well.

Also, you will want to try and influence the title tag for incoming links if any have one. If you can, you will want variety in the link text and title for links pointing to your site…again, it’s about growing your links in a natural way, not simply slapping a bunch of homogenous links up there and walking away.

Variety in your links is perhaps the most critical component of successful link building. Don’t have them all coming from the same place to the same place and so on.

Check back with us next Monday for part II of our quick little link building guide and even learn how you can easily find out which sites are linking to you.

In the mean time, take the above steps to ensure what links you do acquire don’t get you in any trouble and give you the most bang for your buck.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles, SEO Technology, Tip of the Day | 1 Comment »

3 Step Process for Writing Persuasive Copy without the Hype

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Writing persuasive copy that isn’t filled with hype is a common challenge for web copywriters. It takes some talent to thread that needle effectively. You want your copy to be persuasive but not filled with so much hype that it turns people away.

If it is filled with a lot of hype, the customer could experience buyers’ remorse and have ill-feeling toward you (the seller).

Marketing online is more than just making a quick sale…it’s about building your reputation as much as anything. If your website gets the reputation of having too much hype, people will know and either leave your site quickly or not visit at all.

So how can I create persuasive copy that doesn’t contain too much hype?

Many of these copywriting tips have proven their worth in terms of consistent conversions and sales. Continue reading for 3 quick steps you can use to create persuasive copy without resorting to hype.

Focus on your readers, not your products and services

Be sure your copy is focused on your readers and solving their problems. Focusing on how great your products and services are will only make you seem less than sincere. If someone lands on your site, they either clicked an ad or a link on a search engine results page or some other site. They came to you so you can assume they know what they’re looking for and why.

Therefore, focus on the readers to capture their attention and move them through the buying process.

Draw readers’ attention with a great headline

We’ve discussed before how headlines are one of the most important elements in a landing page or online article. If it doesn’t grab a reader’s attention quickly, they will move off your site quicker than you can blink!

Your headline needs to do two things – it needs to ‘catch’ the readers’ attention and it needs to be relevant to the sales copy. To fulfill both of these conditions of an effective headline, place an ‘emotional trigger’ in the headline to keep people’s interest. Focus on the problem your readers have and the solution your products/services offer rather than resorting to hype.

Quickly make your point and provide a ‘call-to-action’

Without resorting to promotional pitches, quickly tell people what your product can do for them. People are not concerned about your business but their situation, which is why they’re searching online for a solution to their problem.

Therefore, that’s why it’s important to speak about them and their problem rather than your products. And do it quickly and provide instructions on what to do next. Most people’s attention spans are quite short and they won’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they should do next.

Additionally, your sentences and paragraphs should be quick and to the point…one, you don’t want to lose readers’ interest by taking forever to get to the point and two, you don’t want to intimidate readers with large chunks of text. Therefore, keep your paragraphs short and to the point (5 lines max.)

Harnessing these 3 steps will go a long way to ensuring your copy is persuasive without the hype that’s so common in many websites and marketing materials. Today’s shoppers are more meticulous than ever…they won’t spend much time on a site that spends all its time talking about itself.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Online Marketing, Tip of the Day, Writing for search engines | No Comments »

4 Ways You Can Build Trust in your Site’s Content

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Building trust is a tried and true method of drawing in new customers and keeping them. You want to create content for your site that helps build this trust – not simply pepper your copy with keywords to get the search engines’ attention.

Saying the same thing over and over again may work in politics but when you’re marketing your small business online, it appears fake to prospective customers. Most who come across content like this immediately leave a website as they are seeing right through the angle the site is trying to play…if not consciously realizing it, site visitors will feel something just doesn’t seem right about the site so they leave.

Besides helping build links and SEO rankings, good content builds trust with site visitors. Continue reading for four ways you can build trust with prospective customer with your site’s content.

1.  Do not hype anything

Hype is still a favorite tactic of low-level marketers. We’ve all seen hype time and again – in commercials, on billboards and in magazines. We’ve become accustomed to it. But the Internet is still relatively new and useful for many things – research, business, shopping and more. People have a much lower tolerance for hype in the online world.

Substantiate all claims. Don’t say you’re “#1” or “the best” unless you can back that up through a third-party. Simply claiming you’re the best because you want it to be true isn’t enough…people find unsubstantiated claims very suspicious.

2. Be genuine, like a friend

Great copy that sells generally reads like a conversation between friends. Writing in a conversational tone that helps the reader solve their problem goes a long way toward building trust. Since online shoppers cannot meet the seller in the flesh, they get extremely suspicious and leave if your content is bland and boring.

Also, don’t spend much time telling outlandish stories or make claims that appear too good to be true…be able to backup claims with third-party verification.

3. Don’t use hidden text that’s hard to find

In the infancy of SEO, webmasters used to write content and make it the same color as their background to hide it from readers. The keyword-rich content got the attention of the search engines at first but no real person would spend much time on the site. You can still “hide” content like that but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

It’s okay to employ hidden content to make your page more usable as long as the reader can easily find it with a simple click of a mouse. But hiding content to make it more difficult for readers to find is wrong.

Before using hidden text though, ask yourself is it valuable? If it is, then your visitors need to be able to read it. If not, then it probably shouldn’t go on the site anyway.

4. Include negative reviews

Another powerful way to gain trust in your site’s content is to include negative reviews of your products. Only including positive reviews will only serve to turn people off…you can lose credibility pretty quickly. Negative reviews help because they give the reader a better-rounded picture of what they’re purchasing. They also help readers determine how the positive attributes of your products outweigh the bad.

Courtesy of SearchEngineGuide.com

Courtesy of SearchEngineGuide.com

Your site’s content is where you make your impression on potential customers. Therefore, it needs to build trust if you want site visitors to purchase your products or use your services. Make sure you’re giving your site visitors a good first impression and not simply creating a jumbled mess of keyword optimized content.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Writing for search engines | No Comments »

5 Ways you can maximize your Landing Page’s Value

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Writing effective product/service landing pages accomplishes several necessary objectives when marketing your small business online. Not only does the keyword-rich page need to grab the attention of search engine spiders, it also needs to maintain a reader’s interest and motivate them to continue.

You don’t want to give away too much but you do want to draw their interest enough so they will click on that link to learn more or buy.

Creating copy that simultaneously achieves both of those objectives is the needle you need to thread to effectively harness the Internet to grow your small business.

So when you’re writing landing pages for your website, consider the following 5 tips to maximize their value on both ends…that is serve as good search engine fodder on one end and an effective marketing message on the other.

Write attention grabbing, eye-catching headlines

Headlines are the best opportunity you have to really grab your reader’s attention…if it doesn’t, they will most likely leave the page. You will want to include a primary keyword that will grab both your both your reader’s and the search engine’s attention.

Include call-to-action often

Next, you need to include a call-to-action that instructs visitors on what to do next. Generic forms of this are “Click here to learn more” and other quick anecdotes but those have shown to not work as well as more unique calls-to-action like “…start increasing your online presence and find more customers by contacting search engine marketers at SEO Advantage today to learn more.

Read 3 Elements of a Good Call-to-Action to learn more.

Like our example, you should also include a keyword phrase for your link in this call-to-action statement for additional search engine benefits. Include at least 2 calls-to-action for a short landing page and 3-5 for longer ones.

Directly address the customer

In your main copy, address the customer as “you” and “your” rather than saying “we,” “us” and “our.” Let the customer know what your company and its products/services and do for them. This relaxes the customer too…making them feel like they’re talking to a friend.

Directly deliver the message

When you’re writing landing pages and other content for marketing your small business online try to think about your copy as a business tool and not an art form. You’re trying to persuade readers to take action, not feel good about your ability to express yourself.

Keep content closely written

Whether your landing page is short (500 words or less) or longer, keep the context of the page tightly knit. Meaning, don’t get sidetracked by including extraneous facts and benefits of your products or services. There’s much debate amongst copywriters on an effective length for a landing page but no matter which one you choose, keep the subject matter within certain parameters.

Accomplishing both SEO and marketing goals through your landing pages and other content will maximize the value of your site for both you and your customers. Not only will search engines reward you for compelling, keyword-rich content, those who find you will be reassured that your products/services can address their needs.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Tip of the Day, Writing for search engines | No Comments »

« Older Entries