Archive for October 2009
Look, Ma, No Hands!: How to build SEO backlinks without lifting a finger
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Today, a poll written by TotalBeauty.com spread across the internet. It contained a list of which cities had “the ugliest men in America”. We’re not condoning this sort of report, but it does come in useful as a case study for how to get attention to your website. CNN ended up picking up the story and sharing it with the nation. Now THAT is definitely some attention. Let’s see how this applies to building SEO backlinks.
Your business marketing campaign has a limited amount of capital, both monetary and time-wise. This means that you need to maximize the efficiency of the effort that you put into your marketing campaigns. Your lead generation is dependent on how adaptive your marketing strategy is to customer demand and market trends, but your business plan depends on long-term, concrete marketing goals. How do you find a happy medium? The trick is to finding what sort of lead generation activities provide the best return on the amount of time or money spent on these endeavors.
In regards to SEO, this means maximizing the efficiency of your time spent on link building. You can go the manual route and painstakingly call, email, and contact other high ranking website for keywords and keyphrases for which you are looking to build relevancy. Depending on what your online marketing campaigns look like, sometimes that really is the only way to go.
For small businesses like home improvement and Rebath, there just isn’t enough time in the day to foster lead generation via manual link building SEO strategies. That’s okay, because you don’t have to! Just stick to what you’re good at, and whip up a quick article about what you know.
If you just got through a Rebath or home improvement project where you successfully battled a common mold problem, why not take a couple of hours to share your success story? In doing so, you can build just as many quality SEO backlinks without having to trudge through directories and beg people to link back to your site. If you share interesting and notable content, soon enough people will build your backlinks for you.
Keep in mind that all these SEO strategies are centered around what you’re already doing, and the only difference is throwing in some documentation and marketing panache.
Don’t waste your time and money by doing things the hard way. Stick to what your doing and share your successes with the world. You can build a good foundation for a successfully online marketing campaign with just that, and that will start you along the path for great lead generation.
One Size does NOT fit all Marketing Solutions
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Just as every person in this world is a special and unique snowflake of creation, marketing campaigns also come in different shapes and sizes.
Not only are they unique to business such as home improvement companies and Rebath businesses, but they are unique within themselves! You can’t have one be all, end all solution for your marketing needs. The trick is to leverage solutions which have strengths for certain aspects of your marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you have a long-term marketing campaign, and have invested marketing capital and budget into billboard advertising and television ads. Television ads take time and money to produce, and are difficult and expensive to utilize for on the spot marketing needs. The same can be said for billboards, as they have long-term campaigns for the most part.
These marketing solutions are great for things like brand and name recognition, but are very difficult to use in a pinch when you want to tailor your latest brilliant marketing ideas. Fortunately for you, there are a plethora of other tools at your disposal.
What is the quickest and easiest way to get a message from your company to the adoring public? Social Media! Let the billboard and television advertising take care of your long-term marketing endeavors while you apply social media in a more surgical manner.
Example:
A storm hits your area and thousands of people are left with destroyed roofing. There are thousands of people looking for roofing help, and they don’t know where to turn! Sure, they might possibly remember your business name from that ad campaign you ran last month, or perhaps from those couple of billboards they saw coming home from the interstate…but why leave it to chance?
This would be the perfect opportunity to increase your lead generation through social media! You can update your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever social media that you use with your specials, services, and product announcements. You can include links to your home page and get some nice traffic rolling in! Not only is this free, but it is instant. Can you say that about many other mediums of communication?
You wouldn’t use a hammer to screw something in, would you? Of course not, so why use the same marketing solutions for every need? A marketing campaign is not a static, one-trick pony (well, at least not the successful ones). A good marketing campaign is diversified with both long-term goals like brand and name recognition, and also short-term goals like product advertising and lead generation. So what’s the difference between good marketing and bad marketing?
The difference is knowing which solution to apply to achieve each goal accordingly.
SEO Snake Oil: Scams and Services to Avoid
Monday, October 19, 2009
Finish this phrase:
“If it sounds too good to be true, ________________ .”
That’s right! It probably is.
Now let’s take a look at some commonly used phrasing in regards to online marketing, SEO, SEM, and other such internet related business practices.
“FIRST PAGE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS GUARANTEED”
When it comes to search engines, the entire practice of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is all based off of educated guesses. There is no inside insight into the search algorithm that Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine used. So while online marketing companies can research and find out the best way to increase search engine visibility (some to great success!), it is all based on really good educated guesses. Google could change their algorithm the next day and your site could plummet to the bottom of the search engine ranks. There are no “guaranteed search engine rankings”. If someone is claiming to guarantee a spot in the SERPs, then they are either outright lying or being disingenuous. They don’t mention for what terms or phrases for which they will garner this magical Google ranking. I’m sure anyone could get first page “wombat psychology summer program registration” results if they really wanted to.
“TOP SEARCH ENGINE RANKING IN 24 HOURS”
There are many things you can do in a 24 hour time span. You can learn the game “Go”, take a trip to a day spa, watch all 6 Star Wars movies, but you can’t really get top search engine ranking for valid keywords and phrases in a 24 hour period. This phrase appeals to the people who are impatient, and because not many people have innate in-depth knowledge of SEO, they waste their time and money on these snake oil services.
There are more scams, but they all amount to the same thing. These shady SEO and SEM services offer a cheap and fast product, and the people that use them get nowhere, but they get nowhere quickly and for little cost.
The moral of the story:
Search Engines were created to put relevant information in the hands of the user. This means that if your website isn’t showing up in the search rankings, then it isn’t relevant information for those search terms. You have two options at this point:
1) Find out the quickest way to exploit Google’s algorithm to boost your search rankings, or find a company to do it for you.
2) Find a seasoned online marketing company that knows how to actually make your page relevant for your desired terms organically and legitimately.
Remember, if your a home improvement company (or any company for that matter) your lead generation is tied to your marketing. If you base your marketing on SEO and SEM provided by unstable business practices, then you’re setting your business up for failure.
Leads and CRM, a Tale of Two Companies
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Lead generation is essential for any sales oriented business or service provider. After all, you can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody knows you exist, you’re not selling a thing. Rebath and home improvement leads are no different. All the marketing and advertising in the world won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t treat those leads with care!
Allow me to rephrase that. If you’re a home improvement or rebath business, you are already busy with the practical side of running your business. You have limited time and capital to put into marketing strategies and lead generation for your business, so when you get a lead, you need to use it to its full potential. This is accomplished through Customer Relationship Management.
Let’s take two companies for an example, an Austin ad agency, and a Texas home improvement and rebath company. Both the Austin ad agency and the home improvement business get 5 incoming leads and only 1 lead turns into a sale, but only the ad agency utilizes a Customer Relationship Management solution. This includes practices such as keeping a database of customer interaction, requesting client feedback, and analyzing this data in order to figure out if the lead was successful, cost effective, etc.
So the home improvement company gained 5 leads, and 1 sale. The Austin ad agency gained 5 leads, 1 sale, and a wealth of information. The benefit of using Customer Relationship Management is that it has the potential to multiply the value of your leads. By analyzing the data provided by your customers, you can see what they like, what they don’t like, what sort of interaction is effective with them, and many other things. You can then take the data that you’ve analyzed and apply the concepts of what you’ve learned to future lead generation strategies.
While the two example companies might have the same success on the surface, the ad agency will be able to fine tune their marketing strategies and advertising in the future to produce more efficient and effective leads for their company.
Use your Customer Relationship Management strategies to find out what types of leads work best for your company. If you don’t know how, there are always those of us that can help you.
The Big Picture: A Quick Marketing Retrospective
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
It’s time for a quiz! (Stop sweating, it’s multiple choice).
Q) Which of these is most important for marketing?
A) Really cool looking marketing material
B) Lead generation. 5000 leads a day, regardless of industry
C) Lunches on the corporate card
D) Knowing your target audience
Pencils down!
For those who chose A: You just might be a Photoshop whiz kid, or a graphic design extraordinaire! Marketing strategies, however, may not subside on cool graphics alone, but on science and math too.
For those who chose B: Yes, lead generation is important, especially in the home improvement industry where there are many, many professionals available to offer their services at any given time. Lead generation, though, means nothing in and of itself. Your lead generation may be exceptional within the home improvement industry, but if they were all looking for a real estate agent in the first place, then the leads are of little to no value.
For those who chose C: Go to the corner store and pick yourself up a snack. Get your head in the game!
For those who chose D: You are absolutely correct. Knowing your target audience is essential for any business marketing campaign, regardless of industry.
Granted, this is easier said than done (and even somewhat obvious), but the point remains the same. Marketing strategies are not one-trick ponies. They are multi-faceted plans that use your marketing capital in order to achieve the greatest return on investment. That’s the marketing game, in a nutshell.
A good litmus test? Ask yourself right now, without cheating or using Google, “What is my target audience.” If you can answer that off the top of your head, then you still have a grasp of who you’re trying to reach.
If you find yourself either unsure, or hesitant to answer, then one of two things might have happened. One, you really might not know who your target audience is. If this is the case, you need to re-evaluate, or even just begin outlining your marketing strategy. What is your message? Who are you trying to reach? Even a small local business here in Austin, Tx needs a marketing strategy. If you don’t even know who you’re trying to reach, how will you ever know once you’ve reached them?!
If you once had a definitive answer to that question, but are now uncertain, then your target audience might have changed without you even knowing it. This is okay, because sometimes business plans and marketing strategies have to adjust and compensate for a variety of factors, and they will be fine as long as you are aware and consciously adjusting your marketing.
A little big picture retrospective is healthy in any planning process:
1) What are you trying to say?
2) To whom are you trying to say this?
3) How (via what mediums) will I get my message across?
4) Is this working?
With a carefully planned marketing strategy, 1 and 2 should be easy to answer, and 3 should be flexible until question 4 yields a “yes”.
Simple enough? (yeah, right).