This week, we decided to move our blog to a new WordPress platform under a hosted account rather than the free account we have been using for the past several years.
This blog will remian up and we may post on occassion but from now on, check out our Website Marketing Strategies blog.
The secretary of education wants to make it mandatory for kids to spend 6 days or more a week in school and have to attend for 11 months or longer. The kids would also be required to participate in longer school days – maybe as much as 10 hours or more.
Watch the Video: http://tinyurl.com/czve68
According to Rachel Metz, AP Technology Writer, those of us with iPhones or an iPod Touch don’t need to spend big bucks for the new Kindle book reader from Amazon because there’s now a free app for it in iTunes.
Math Cards, the newest iPhone App from DollarApp.com, offers kids a fun way to improve math skills. Math Cards is great for adults too, offering a discreet way to brush up on your addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
I just setup the WordPress for iPhone – it is a great app; very easy to setup and use.
The only drawback is the inability to turn the phone sideways to type with a bigger keypad. Apart from that, it is a great app that let’s you post from anywhere.
The bonus is the app is free from the app store. Now, if we could only copy and paste.
As you can see, you can even post images….
Get your WordPress App free from the App Store.
The biggest problem with website marketing for debt elimination or debt consolidation websites are that they are in one of the most competitive industries online. If you own a debt consolidation or debt elimination site, here are a few things you need to know in order to compete within this industry:
Geo-Targeting or targeting specific areas of the country or even specific areas of a state is in most cases the best option for a company because the amount of competitive sites for a specific area are much less than for a nationwide campaign. The other advantage is that you often times close more deals from local business simply because you are local and not some firm far off that they can only talk with on the phone.
Targeting long-tail search terms is really the only way to go in this industry, especially when your website marketing is targeted to a nationwide audience. If your website hasn’t been online very long or has not developed enough link popularity to target a term such as “Debt Settlement”, which has over 4 million competing sites in Google, it would be better to look for a term such as California Debt Consolidation which only has 376,000 competing sites but drives around 20 visitors each day. Or maybe, Eliminate Credit Card Debt which has 650,000 competing sites and drives around 40 visitors per day.
Another solution and one that really should be implemented no matter who or where your target audience is located is content marketing. Most websites don’t do well in the search engines because they don’t have sufficient content for the search engines to take them seriously. Writing more content relating to your industry or hiring a firm to write the content, will not only allow your site to develop more credibility with the search engines but will also give you more places to embed keyword specific term. It will also offer you the ability to promote this content on article release sites, blogs and social networks which, when each article is properly optimized, will send link popularity values back to your primary website.
Since link popularity is roughly 60% to 70% of Google’s ranking algorithm, anything you can do to improve link popularity will only serve to improve your keyword positions faster than anything else you can do. But remember, a all-inclusive website marketing program is what you really need – it is better to bring visitors from several different locations than to rely on Google or Yahoo to be your bread winner.
Google Product Search, formally known as Google Base, is still run by the same product distribution technology known as Google Base but is know rebranded and incorporated into the Google Search Results as “Shopping Results”.
So, What’s the big deal about Google Product Search?
During the month of November 2008, Google reported 11.8 million unique visitors had used Google Product Search. Those numbers are up 786% from the same period in 2007 – that is an amazing increase in web users.
Why the jump in visitors? Because Google finally started using their own technology. Google Product Search has been around for a long time but was always a flop for customers until Google included it in their standard keyword results at Google.com. This inclusion is all part of the new and revised Universal Search technology that drives Google.
So, What Does This Mean For Your Website?
Well, if you sell any type or amount of products, you can add them to Google Product Search for free. That’s right, this is a free tool and there are two easy ways to upload your products – the first being a single upload of one product at a time. Or, you can create and upload a data feed, which will let you put hundreds or thousands of products online quickly.
This is not the end-all, be-all solution to selling more products online but it certainly will give you a better chance attracting customers.
Check Out: Google Product Search
If you need some assistance with this program, give me a call or drop me an email and I can give you more details and help you get setup with this program.
A joint survey performed by Hearst Electronics Group and Goldstein Group Communications (GGC), revealed that nearly half, 47% to be precise, of all marketing budgets are being directed to online marketing programs as opposed to traditional forms such as trade shows, print and the like.
According to Goldstein Group Communications President Joel Goldstein, “The sense of urgency to move to online marketing has been felt by leading marketing organizations for some time now, but the extent to which budgets have been re-defined is dramatic.”
There are several schools of thought as to why this trend is increasing but the most obvious is cost and lead quality. I believe the rising cost of traditional marketing coupled with the inability to focus campaigns to the extent possible with online marketing, the lack of ability to provide measurable results, and the downturn in consumer spending has heavily encouraged companies to embrace the internet as a viable marketing alternative.
Traditional advertising in places like the Yellow Pages or trade magazines can run as much as $2,000 per month per ad. Trade shows can be even more expensive when you consider the cost of travel, lodging and meals for each sales rep, the cost of booth space and of course the large expense put into trade show graphics, display stands and printed marketing material.
Several recent polls have suggested the average online marketing program will run a company between $1,500 to $5,000 per month, depending on the size and scope of the program. While that seems to be inline with some traditional marketing costs, you have to remember that your online programs target a wider array of customers through multiple web mediums.
When you combine the lower cost per acquisition with a higher quality of lead, you have a winning combination. Traditional marketing has very limited abilities that don’t often allow businesses to target customers based on geographical regions, age, gender, interests or buying habits, but online marketing programs are developed specifically to target customers based on these criteria.
According to a recent article by Mike Sachoff, a staff writer at WebProNews, marketers are reporting that their websites generate the best source of leads, roughly 24%. Search engines follow closely behind at 19%.
So, what does all this mean for you? Well, first off, it means you’re on the right track!
As your marketing progresses so will the success you experience, but you need to know that as the web continues to develop there will be positive trends that will produce more business than you can imagine, at the same time there will be negative trends that will test your patience and at times make you feel it’s time to through in the towel.
What I can tell you is that there’s no magic to good marketing – the success of your campaign depends on the amount of time you are willing to invest, the quality and overall availability of your products and the type of campaigns your marketing firm sets up for you.
Let me be the first to tell you – the more online tactics you can use, the more success you will see in the future. But, the longer you are willing to stick with these programs, the more stable your results will be, the higher your search engine positions and the more success you will experience as a whole.
A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a new tool called iClockr. This handy little tool lets a person setup projects and tasks for each project and then track the time you spend on each task.
Sounds pretty basic right? Well, that’s the point. When I was looking for a time tracker, I didn’t want a big bulky tool that took me 10 minutes to setup each project / task – what I did want was a small, out-of-the-way tool that can sit in the corner of my screen and takes me less than 30 seconds to setup new tasks.
Probably the best thing about this piece of software is the cost – IT IS FREE!
If you run a Mac, you need iClockr – visit their website: http://www.iclockr.com/
Trevor Walter : Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.
