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I will be speaking and teaching this topic on Monday June 15th 2009 at the Round Table Pizza on the corner of Thurstan and Vancouver Mall Blvd. I will be at a Networking meeting that meets there every Monday at noon. The meeting is over at 1:00. If you have ever wondered how to use Twitter in your business effectively then come and learn about some tools and ideas that will make it work for you. Here is a Twitter story taken from an article called Conversational Marketing with Twitter by Kalena Jordan
In February 2009, Utah-based Mexican restaurant chain Costa Vida sent a one-day-only offer for a free burrito to its 80 Twitter followers. As part of the promotion, Costa Vida required customers to have an electronic coupon on their mobile phone.
The burrito was designed to test the effectiveness of leveraging social media websites like Twitter and FaceBook in brand building and driving restaurant traffic. However, Costa Vida customers tweeted about the promotion and forwarded the offer to friends via mobile phone. Their followers told their own followers and so on, until more than 2500 people inundated one of Costa Vida’s stores looking for their free burrito.
There are 6 easy steps to market online to a specific niche.
Define your niche and their needs
Talk the language of your niche
“Hang out” where your niche is on the Internet
Create content targeted towards your niche
Post content on the Internet and link it to your services, products, website
Be consistent and as your content grows so will your traffic
Let’s look at each of these steps a little closer.
Define Your Niche and Their Needs
Many business owners fail to completely define their niche. Some fail to recognise they even have a niche. Marketing to everyone that breaths will get your company to broke very fast. Look at your top clients, what do they have in common? Analyse your business and determine what type of client you really want to work with – then define the niche a little more. Choose from the “cream of the crop” and go after more of your very best clients. While you are defining who your niche are, remember to note their needs and be sure your business is offering services or products that these people are actually looking for. A prime example is a supplement distributor deciding that everyone needs their products. While everyone could improve their health – not everyone cares to try. Finding people that are already thinking healthy is a step in the right direction. Then narrow it down to people that are actively seeking advice or are searching for an answer to a problem. Forget about everyone else – they will come to you when the time is right for them.
Talk the Language of Your Niche
Don’t talk over peoples heads. Use the language that people in your target market are already using – even if you have to “dummy down” and speak to them directly. People are comfortable in their own little worlds – don’t make them feel they have to get out a dictionary to understand what you are saying. If your niche are technical people then use the vocabulary that works for them.
Hang Out Where Your Niche Is On the Internet
Discover where your niche hangs out on the Internet, then join those Social Sites. My niche is Small Business Owners and the leading site I use is LinkedIn. There are so many different Social Sites on the Internet and every industry seems to have sites that cater to them specifically. Search Google until you find where your target market is socializing and hanging out; then join that site and get to know people and let people get to know you. Do not go in spamming or pushing your services. Social Networking online is just like social networking offline. I would never go into a crowded room of people and start to sell my products to everyone. It is rude and a very easy way to get banned from the site.
Create Content Targeted Towards Your Niche and Post it on the Internet
This is the most important step. Find out what your target market is searching for then create content with those keywords. Flood the Internet with your content so when a potential client searches, your content comes up high in Google and they get the answer to their question from you. Make sure all your content is linked to more of your content and to your blog/website. If you are selling something then link your content to the exact page where the potential customer will find the product or service that will solve their problem. Do not make them hunt it down – they will just go to somewhere easier. If your niche likes to watch video and listen via podcasts then make sure you are offering them a content format that they want and are used to. Not everyone like to read!
Be Consistent and as Your Content Grows So Will Your Traffic
Don’t feel like you need to spend hours on this every day. Do what you can do and be consistent. I know people that block out 1 hour per week to work on Internet Marketing. I know others that do something every day. Find what works for you and then commit to doing it on schedule. Over time your content will grow and links to your site will grow. This will make your traffic grow and sales increase. This is not an overnight success plan – it is a slow and proven plan to get traffic to your site. The more you can commit to content the faster you will get results.
The average business owner is very confused when it comes to Online Marketing. Many see no purpose for Social Sites as they relate to business. I am here to dispel several myths about Social Networking. Here is a list of what people have told me –
Are you using Video yet? If you are not you should be. I am just starting to incorporate video into my marketing. I uploaded my first video to YouTube in February. The one drawback to video is that once you have filmed and edited your video, then you have to upload it and write a description and tags over and over again. I HUGE time waster. Depending on the size of the video and your Internet connection it could take well over 10 minutes per video upload – and there are so many different places to upload your video. I just found a free tool for uploading videos once then posting it to 14 different video sites. The tool is TubeMogul.com
As I said it is free to use – it does take a while the first time because you have to have an account at each different site. However once you have entered the password information TubeMogul saves it which makes future posting a breeze.
Tube Mogul also tracks the views of your videos so you can see where the views are coming from and how many different times they get viewed. You can also track other peoples videos (competition?). I have found other paid services that will submit to more sites, but for free – what the heck – why not give it a try!
Here are a few other articles on TubeMogul from the sphere.
Tim Reha discusses Internet Video Distribution with Mark Rotblat … – TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web’s top video sharing sites …
Where in World is Your Video Playing? TubeMogul Readies Global …- Emeryville-based TubeMogul, the platform that allows video publishers to use one log-in page to upload to over 15 different video sharing sites, is expanding its analytics services. A number of content creators and shows use TubeMogul …
TubeMogul adds Howcast as a video distributor- Video distribution and analytics engine TubeMogul of Emeryville, Calif. (DEMO 08) today announced it added Howcast, a new instructional video production and share Web site, to its arsenal of sites where it automatically uploads videos …
I would like to hear other peoples experience with this service.
For a time saving service with Twitter: Tweeter Getter.
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce my clients to the concept of promoting your own website to bring in new customers and revenue. Relying on Search Engine Optimization only is not a good idea. Search Engines are constantly changing their search algorithms (search criteria) and most sites can not keep up with the changes unless they are paying a great deal of money to have their site managed by a SEO company. Renegade University will teach you many different techniques for promoting your own site and getting tons of free traffic to your site. Free traffic is the best kind! Do not mistake free traffic as poor prospects. These are people that are actively looking for your product or service – your target market. Renegade University will teach you:
Renegade U has a free level that contains training videos and other training materials. It also has a paid membership that will literally walk you through how to set up your Internet Marketing Campaign. Click the purple button above to learn more about me and to go to the page where you can register for the free version of Renegade U.
The Internet (Web 2.0) is the next BIG thing in marketing.Being able to capitalize on Social Networking on the Internet will put your business ahead of the competition.Since most people have not looked into marketing on the Internet – part of my business is teaching my customers that getting a website up and running is only the start of marketing on the Internet.Learning how to promote your new site or business is where the “magic” is at.This is how your business will profit from Internet Marketing.
The newest phase of Internet Marketing is called Web 2.0 pages or sites.These are sites that are interactive in some way.Well known examples are YouTube,MySpace, and Facebook.All of these sites are used by individuals to do things as simple as sharing themselves with the world to promoting and idea with the world or promoting a business or product with the world.Why not learn how to make these powerful tools work for you and add to YOUR bottom line?
I will be posting articles here to help people learn how to market their sites and businesses, but you could also learn more and quicker by registering for the Renegade University.There is a free level that has tremendous amount of training that can be implemented into your business immediately.Go at your own pace and watch the video training series to learn about getting more clients into YOUR business via the Internet.
Search engine optimization can be confusing, especially for people who are new to the concept. However, there are a few simple things that anyone can do that will help increase a webpage’s chances of being ranked higher by search engines and increasing the number of visitors to your website. How much time you spend optimizing your website is up to you, but you should take a little bit of time to do some of the following techniques:
1. Have a site with well-written content. Optimization is worthless if your site is not full of good content.
2. Include a short site description in the title. Search engines will display between 66 to 130 characters of your title when they list search results. Each page title should be constructed so that it informs and attract users. For best results, include a title and a subtitle.
3. Create a site map and submit it to the major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. You should also place a link to your site map on the index page of your site.
4. Make sure that each page of your site has at least 250 words of text on it.
5. Declare a “doctype” at the top of every page and a character-set type.
6. Keep your URLs as simple as possible. Try to use URLs that have keywords in them instead of numbers.
7. Decide upon several keywords and phrases and use them throughout the page. This includes putting them in the title, content, anchor tags, Meta tags, and links.
8. Avoid frames. Search engine spiders are unable to read them. If you feel that you must use frames, include important body text within a <no frames> tag.
9. Register with search engines and directories by hand.
10. Avoid listing words repeatedly. This is considered keyword “stuffing” and is more likely to decrease your search engine ranking than improve it.
11. Do not use “black hat techniques” to try and artificially increase your site’s ranking. It will only end up backfiring and will probably get you banned from the search engine.
12. Do not use flash or images in place of searchable text. Also, use the “alt tag” to describe any images on your site. This information is indexed by search engines.
13. Use headers that are relevant and contain key words. Not only do they help organize your text, but they are also weighed heavily by search engines.
14. Update your site frequently. Search engines like sites that are growing and offer new content.
15. Use a blog to extend your site and keep your content fresh. Your blog should be an extension of your website (“http://www.yourwebsite.com/blogname” and not “http://yourwebsite.bloghost.com”)
16. Place a robots.txt file on your server. This will instruct web robots which directories can or cannot be crawled by search engine spiders.
17. Avoid using doorway or splash pages. Doorway pages are designed specifically for search engines and are considered another black hat tactic. Most search engines are capable of recognizing them, which makes them pointless. Splash pages are intended to be entryways to your site and usually consist of some type of flash animation. Although they might look cool, they take a long time to load and contain no content for search engines to crawl.
18. Include the major Meta tags on all of your pages. While the “key words” tag is not as important as it used to be, it should still be included. The “description” tag is more important since it is what search engines list after the title in their results.
19. Validate your HTML so search engines can read it. You should also validate any CSS and JavaScript that you use.
20. Hand submit your site to the major search engines. This is a simple step but can go a long way in getting your site listed.
Now that you understand some of the basics of search engine optimization, you can decide if you want to go more in-depth and take the time to optimize your site further. You might also consider having your website optimized by a professional. Either way, you have at least minimized some of the things that can lower you website’s ranking, which could have cost you potential visitors.- Darcy Logan
I would like to welcome you to my blog. I will be updating this at least weekly if not more often. I will be addressing questions that customers have asked about repeatedly about how to get their sites listed in the search engines and anything else SEO related. I will also be posting interesting tidbits from the industry.
Do you keep hearing “You need to be on Twitter” or “Get More Customers from Social Media” but you have no idea how your business can benefit from a Twitter?Learn More: Create A Twitter Business Page
I will be speaking and teaching this topic on Monday June 15th 2009 at the Round Table Pizza on the corner of Thurstan and Vancouver Mall Blvd. I will be at a Networking meeting that meets there every Monday at noon. The meeting is over at 1:00. If you have ever wondered how to use Twitter in your business effectively then come and learn about some tools and ideas that will make it work for you. Here is a Twitter story taken from an article called Conversational Marketing with Twitter by Kalena Jordan
The average business owner is very confused when it comes to Online Marketing. Many see no purpose for Social Sites as they relate to business. I am here to dispel several myths about Social Networking. Here is a list of what people have told me –
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