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Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
Published:
July 20, 2012
Overview
Why buy several books on web marketing when you can buy just one? With this must-have resource, five marketing professionals team up to share their expertise in the field of web marketing so that you can benefit from their know-how. Covering everything from site building, search engine optimization, and web analytics to online advertising, e-mail marketing, and harnessing the potential of social media, this team of web marketing gurus brings their insight and experience to the table and it's yours for the taking.
Web marketing encompasses a wide range of electronic means to get your product in front of potential customers. Market your product through your business's website, through other people's websites, in their e-mail, or on their phones — nearly everywhere. Market your goods and services effectively by using tools like such as strong SEO terms and pay per click, and by analyzing your marketing campaign every day.
About The Author
John Arnold is a renowned marketing trainer and speaker as well as an entrepreneur and small business advisor. Arnold continues to train and advise small business owners as a Constant Contact regional development director. Michael Becker is the managing director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association. Becker has written more than 80 articles on mobile marketing and is an adjunct professor of mobile marketing at Golden Gate University. Marty Dickinson is the president of HereNextYear.com, a company that combines writing, speaking, and internet strategy to help clients become recognized authorities in their fields. Dickinson also works as a business consultant to web designers and SEO specialists. Ian Lurie has been a digital marketer for over 25 years. He created and sold the digital agency Portent, Inc. and provides consulting and training services. Elizabeth Marsten is the senior director of strategic marketplace services for Tinuiti. Marsten has experience in Google AdWords, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Advertising, Facebook, and other platforms.
Articles From The Book
3 results
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WordPress, a premier blogging tool, has evolved over the years to become a good choice for marketing websites. Many large companies with thousands of website visitors per month use WordPress for their entire website, not just the blog area. Some companies use WordPress for websites that don’t even include a blog!
Marketing
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Analytics is the art of, well, analyzing web marketing data and using the results to find ways to improve your marketing. Web data analysis pays off; for example, you can determine who is shopping and when, or which products are hot or not.
Keep these points in mind to get more bang out of your marketing buck:
Reports do not equal analytics!
Marketing
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Pay per click (PPC) can have several benefits to your online marketing campaign. You should be aware of the possible advantages before using it in your own campaign. Below are some of the benefits:
It’s a form of advertising that anyone can do.
It gives advertisers a lot of control of their budgets and audiences.
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E-Mail Marking Providers (EMPs) allow you to accomplish much more with your e-mail marketing than you otherwise could on your own. Some EMPs even provide various levels of outsourcing for higher prices if you don’t want to do your own e-mail marketing. Here are a few examples of the kinds of benefits that EMPs provide:
Give your business a professional look.
Marketing
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Editorial guidelines are always set forth by the search engine or the distributor of pay per click (PPC) ads, so many variations exist for online marketing. The major search engines have similar rules and regulations that are fairly easy to follow, but if you run into issues or have questions, consult the help center for that particular engine.
Marketing
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Pay per click (PPC) is a popular web marketing tool: You place an ad on a website, pay the site owner for each click-through (that is, every visitor who clicks through to your site), and enjoy the exposure. Like everything else, PPC has its own jargon, which the following list can help you sort through:
ad group: Where and how your ads and keyword lists are organized.
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Web marketing provides a lot of data which only become clear when it is compared to other data. Here you see an example of how you can bring the different statistics together and draw conclusions about the value of a referrer.
Take a look at the referrer report (All Traffic). (Choose Traffic Sources→Sources→All Traffic.
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In web marketing if you’re getting traffic from search engines (and you’d better be), folks are finding you by searching on keywords. Knowing which keywords they’re using to find you gives you a hint as to the questions they might need to have answered when they first land on your site.
The following holds true for both paid and unpaid keywords.
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As a web marketer, it is important to know the answers to the following questions: How do search engines determine what ads to show when? And to what degree can they calculate which advertiser is more relevant than others? Each engine has an algorithm developed that sorts out which ad to show, when to and where on the result page to show it, and how much to charge the advertiser.
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Getting more web marketing e-mail delivered starts with sending your e-mail from a reputable e-mail server. According to a recent study conducted by Return Path , 77 percent of e-mail delivery issues occur because of the sender’s reputation. Most companies that provide e-mail delivery for their customers consider the reputation of the sender when filtering e-mail.
Marketing
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When it comes to commercially addressing text messages, your Common Short Code means everything. In the United States, all commercial text messages (text messages for the purpose of mobile marketing) must be addressed and sent via Common Short Codes.
A Common Short Code (CSC) is simply a short (five- or six-digit) phone number used to address and route commercial text or multimedia messages through wireless operator networks.
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Text links in web marketing e-mails are clickable words or phrases that result in certain actions when clicked. Links use HTML to tell the computer what to do when someone clicks the link, so your e-mail links need to contain HTML to work in e-mail programs.
If you’re using raw HTML to create links for your e-mails, a simple link to a website looks like this:
<a href="http://www.
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Navigation links in web marketing e-mails are HTML links that allow your audience to jump to visual anchors within the body of your e-mail. If your e-mails have one or more headlines or bodies of content that your audience has to scroll to for viewing, you can include navigation links in your e-mail to
Highlight the content that your audience can’t see immediately.
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iGoogle is a useful tool to web marketers. One helpful tool is the RSS feed reader. If iGoogle isn’t the default RSS feed reader for your browser, you’ll need to add the feed to iGoogle by hand. Only a few steps are added, though, so don’t worry:
Click the RSS link on the website you want to follow.
Copy the feed URL in the address bar.
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As your pay per click (PPC) campaign progresses, it will become more apparent to you as the web marketer which keywords are generating the quality of traffic you want. You can add keywords in Google if you need to modify your choice of keywords.
The best way to determine how your keywords are performing is to use an analytics or conversion tracking package that tells you the amount of revenue a keyword has generated, the number of page views, the amount of time visitors spend on the site, and how quickly they leave.
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Once you have run your pay per click (PPC) campaign for a while, it will become obvious which keywords are working, which ones aren’t working, and which keywords need to be added. MSN adCenter offers a way to add keywords as these trends make themselves apparent.
To add a keyword to an existing ad group in MSN adCenter, follow these steps:
Open the ad group to which you want to add a keyword.
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iGoogle offers many options for your online marketing needs. One option is to add a blog search result. Rather than follow just one specific blog, you can track what most blogs are saying, all at one time, by using Google Blog Search. Running a search for your company name, for example, shows every blog entry mentioning your company.
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iGoogle is a very user-friendly social media desktop tool and allows you to add other services, such as a website or blog feed for your online marketing needs. You can also add this to any previous Google accounts you may have already set up.
After you create your iGoogle homepage, you can start tracking news feeds and getting up-to-date information.
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MSN adCenter can be a useful tool for web marketers. After you gain experience, you may want to adjust your keyword list. When you created your account, you may have chosen to accept the default options when you entered your initial keyword list. If you did, the match type was broad and the maximum CPC was applied to all keywords in that ad group.
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SEO is a long process. In order to be successful in web marketing, you will need to analyze your results. Changes you make now may take months to actually impact your traffic, so you need your worksheet to provide a long-term look at what worked.
Use your tracking worksheet
If you haven’t set up your worksheet yet, get going!
Marketing
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Branding in web marketing is the use of graphic design elements to give your business a consistent and unique identity while forming a mental image of your business’s personality. Examples include:
Graphics and logos unique to your business
Text and fonts that differentiate your business
Colors used consistently to give your business an identity
Branding your e-mails helps your audience to immediately recognize and differentiate your e-mails from the unfamiliar e-mails they receive.
Marketing
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In web marketing, you can get into trouble when link building because for years, link building has been abused as an SEO strategy. So, search engines have put automatic filters and whole teams of engineers and editors in place to check for
Sudden, unexplained link growth
Links from bad neighborhoods
That’s SEO shorthand for a group of sites known to be sleazy.
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The following explains how in web marketing, tracking returning visitors is important. Here we will find out how many returning visitors you have and how to use this as a benchmark for increasing the percentage of returning visitors, which reflects visitor loyalty. The following steps help you set the target, again using Google Analytics:
Open the report that calculates your percentage of repeat visitors.
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Changing your e-mail From line is usually a matter of typing sender information in your e-mail application’s account options, but e-mail marketing providers (EMPs) allow you to create unique header information for each specific e-mail campaign during the campaign-creation process.
Credit: Courtesy of Constant Contact
Ask yourself how your audience is most likely to recognize you, and then craft your From line to include that information.
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The destination and display URLs can impact your online marketing success, so choosing the best ones possible is essential. The destination URL is where the user arrives after clicking your ad. The URL could be the homepage, a product page, or a specially crafted landing page. The choice of a destination URL can affect your visitor’s experience, so keep the following guidelines in mind:
Deliver on the promise of the display URL.
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Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones represent an opportunity to easily collect web marketing e-mail addresses on location. All the following methods of mobile e-mail address collection are worth using in your business.
Get customers to text their e-mail addresses
Use your advertising to ask customers and prospects to text their e-mail address.
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In web marketing, you’re likely to employ several media and messages over a period of days, weeks, months, and years to communicate everything necessary to attract and retain enough customers.
Delivering your messages by combining different media is an effective way to market your business, but you’ll probably find it more affordable to lean heavily on a few communication media where delivering your message results in the highest return.
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The heading is the first text your customers see in web marketing and it should be connected to the copy on your site. Like your title tag, it needs to stand on its own and contain your key phrase.
Unlike your title tag, though, it should directly support the paragraph beneath it. The title tag can be relevant to the entire page without referring to the first paragraph on that page.
Marketing
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If you’ve decided to give Google AdWords a try in your web marketing campaign, this will help you with the process, from setting up your account to getting it activated and getting your ads running. If you need help during setup, Google AdWords provides a toll-free number with live operator assistance during weekdays.
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The best way to plan your text-messaging communication marketing campaign flow is to use a user-flow diagram — an image that outlines the user flow and details all the interactions that may occur between a mobile subscriber and your mobile marketing program.
Create your text-messaging user-flow diagram with any software application such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio.
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The pay per click (PPC) ads alongside Bing search results are provided through MSN adCenter. You can create an account and campaigns using adCenter for your web marketing needs. Microsoft has been making strides to improve its PPC service’s interface, tools, search quality, and volume, by adding programs such as Bing Travel, adCenter Desktop (an offline PPC ads editor), product search, and expanded reporting options.
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Bounced web marketing e-mails are generally unavoidable because the causes of bounced e-mail fall outside your direct control. However, you can take some reasonably effective steps to minimize bounced e-mail.
Here we show you how to deal with bounces and when to take corrective action.
How to deal with hard bounces
A hard bounce is an e-mail that’s returned because a permanent condition makes delivering the e-mail impossible.
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Using web marketing to bring leads and sales to your business can easily be a full-time job for three or four people, let alone you by yourself. Even the most cutting-edge online strategies won’t move forward until you turn the keys in the ignition.
Answer these questions to help you decide how much you want to be involved with the day-to-day operations of a website strategy:
What are you really, really good at?
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Goals? Key Performance Indicators? (KPIs) What’s the difference? It might seem like they’re the same, but they’re not. KPIs measure performance. Goals measure success and only success. All goals are KPIs. Not all KPIs are goals. Dizzy yet?
KPIs are signs of a response to your message and site. Goals are what happen when the visitor does what you want him to.
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Goals are based on specific metrics that drive your web marketing business and website. These metrics — what make or break success — are key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs track the health of your online marketing efforts, for the good (success KPIs) or for the not-so-good (warning KPIs).
A KPI is not the same as a conversion goal!
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Sending marketing e-mails without permission of the addressee might violate the current CAN-SPAM laws and is likely to result in a high number of spam complaints from recipients.
Follow these steps to determine the permission status of a list you acquired or inherited with questionable permissions:
Sort your list by source.
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Many proven models are available for building businesses online so that you have no reason to “pick numbers out of a hat” any longer. In fact, you can pick virtually any financial number you want to receive per month or per year and have a very close idea of what kind of budget will be required to get you there.
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Many carriers offer developer and content-channel relationship portals that you can sign up for your mobile marketing campaign. The channel relationship business model differs from the direct carrier relationship because you’re not negotiating a direct deal. With a channel relationship, you get access to the carrier portal, business terms that are easy to use, royalty payments for selling your content, access to the carrier’s marketing education materials, and more.
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Estimating traffic is a good way for web marketers to determine what to add to their keyword list. Google’s free keyword tool predicts — based on the keywords, URLs, or categories you select — how many clicks and searches you’ll record for that month. This tool can also show you the amount of competition and peak months of the year for searches on your selections.
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At some point, you’ll want to expand your keyword list and estimating traffic in MSN can be useful to help web marketers do just that. But how do you determine which keywords to add? There are tools that tell you — based on data from previous searches and related searches — how many impressions and clicks you may receive for your new list of keywords.
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Confirmed permission in web marketing happens when someone implicitly or explicitly subscribes to your e-mail list, and you respond to the subscriber with an e-mail requiring the subscriber to confirm his interest by reading your intended usage and then clicking a confirmation link.
If the subscriber doesn’t confirm, his e-mail address isn’t added to your list, even if he explicitly filled out and submitted a form or physically signed your guest book.
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Web marketers need to be aware of content filters when preparing their e-mails for distribution. The majority of e-mail filters are included within e-mail programs and written with broad consumer preferences in mind to filter e-mail content that has spam-like characteristics. E-mail filters within e-mail programs almost always allow the user to access the default filter settings and alter them according to user preferences.
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In web marketing, link building — getting other sites to link to yours — is critical to your search engine optimization efforts. However, many people ignore the rest of SEO and focus entirely on acquiring links. Link building is not the only component, and ignoring great copy, great code, and a well-structured site in favor of link building is a mistake.
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You have to be an advanced HTML and database programmer to track web marketing e-mails on your own; using an e-mail marketing provider (EMP) makes the task much easier. EMPs automatically add special tracking code to the links you include in your e-mails. The tracking code is unique to each individual on your e-mail list and is also tied to each e-mail campaign.
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To avoid having your web marketing e-mails reported as spam, understand how consumers evaluate e-mails. When you think about whether your audience is likely to perceive your e-mail as spam, remember that spam is in the I of the receiver:
I don’t want it. Unwanted marketing e-mails are perceived as spam by most consumers, especially if they feel that they didn’t authorize the sender to send it.
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Web marketing e-mails can deliver attached files of all sorts but unless they are accessed by a link they probably won’t be seen by the recipient. Attaching files should be reserved for sending personal e-mails to a small number of people at a time.
Most e-mail programs and e-mail servers have security settings that send e-mails with attached files to a junk folder when the program suspects that the e-mail is commercial in nature.
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It’s common practice in mobile marketing to offer prize promotions, run contests, and give stuff away as incentives to encourage people to participate in marketing programs. You could run a program that gives small prizes instantly throughout the campaign period and ends by awarding one lucky participant a grand prize.
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As a web marketer, one of most complex aspects of pay per click (PPC) management is bid management. Most search engines require you to set your bids when you set up an ad group.
Bids are set at two levels:
Ad-group level: At the ad-group level, you must set a maximum bid — the largest amount that you’re willing to pay for a single click.
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An affiliate product is an item that another business produces, delivers, and supports. You can earn money from your website by marketing the products of another company. When someone makes a purchase through that website as a result of your recommendation, you get paid a sales commission. Affiliate programs don’t usually require you to create a website to promote them.
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After you have the main components of your website set up, you can automatically use its content to market your products to the world using a free tool like dlvr.it.
Dlvr.it is a free web-based tool that allows you to post messages to multiple social networks at the same time. dlvr.it lets you schedule messages to post on future dates and times and enable real-time updates from your blog to the main social networks.
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In mobile marketing, a request for an opt-in is called an opt-in call to action. You can place an opt-in call to action in any traditional, new, and mobile media channel, including the following:
Television
Print
Radio
Point-of-sale displays
Face-to-face encounters
Outdoor advertising
A web or mobile Internet site
An e-mail
A customer-care call
Online advertising
A dialog pop-up setting in a downloadable application
How to dial and press
Dialing and pressing is all about using the voice channel of the mobile phone.
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Once you’ve set up your company’s Facebook page, it may need some added flare and polishing to attract online consumers. Initially, your page is pretty bare. Time to give it some life. First add a cover image:
Click the Add a Cover button.
It’s right under the admin panel.
Select a photo.
You can select a photo by uploading from your computer or choosing from among photos you’ve already uploaded.
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In order to generate interest in your online marketing campaign, you may need to post content to Google+. Posts from profiles you’ve circled show up in your stream. That’s the first page you see when you log in to Google+.
You can comment on, share, or +1 posts that appear in your stream. When you do, the person who posted the content receives a notification.
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Placing a sign-up link in every online presence possible is a great way to collect web marketing information with explicit permission. A sign-up link is a text box, button, or text that usually links to a sign-up form or a confirmation page that allows your subscriber to enter and submit additional information and preferences.
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When you have a complete web marketing keyword list organized by ad groups and match types, you can segment the list even further. This situation applies if you want to drive visitors to a specific product or place, but starting a separate ad group doesn’t make sense.
Some of the keywords indicate specific colors for rose wedding invitations: red and pink.
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Before bringing out the credit card and keyword list, make sure you’ve done your web marketing homework so you can select a search engine’s pay per click (PPC) platform that is right for you. Although the search engines may seem to be pretty similar, they differ on some big points.
Also, depending on the industry or field that you’re advertising for, one engine could be much more beneficial than another in terms of return on investment (ROI), audience reach for volume and targeting, costs, and time spent managing your campaigns.
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Incremental bidding can come in handy in your web marketing campaign. It increases the amount of your bid when MSN detects a user in the chosen demographic, time of day, or day of the week. You can set this at the ad group or campaign level in the settings area of a campaign or ad group under targeting options.
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Facebook has a lot of marketing tools, and you can use them once you set up your company’s Facebook Page. The page is your central switchboard, customer service center, and water cooler, all in one. Almost any content you share as your company will link back to your company Page. It’s also where you can update your entire Facebook community.
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After you have created your AdWords account, you’re on your way to web marketing success and ready to set up your first campaign. Follow these steps to create your first campaign:
Sign in to AdWords.
Click the Create Your First Campaign button.
Click the Campaign Type button and select the Search Only radio button for your first campaign.
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Netvibes can be a useful tool to web marketers and you should start by setting up a homepage. If you like a slightly more polished interface, want more customization options, or aren’t comfortable using Google because of privacy concerns (some folks just aren’t), Netvibes is an excellent choice.
Setting up a Netvibes homepage takes only five steps:
In your web browser, go to Netvibes and sign in or create an account.
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As a web marketer, you may have been required to set a budget when you did your account set up in Google AdWords, but your first budget may require some adjustment.
To set or adjust your budget in Google AdWords, follow these steps:
Log in to your AdWords account.
On the Campaigns tab, click the dollar/day number under the budget column.
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You may already be using MSN adCenter in your web marketing campaign. When provisioning your account, MSN should’ve prompted you to enter a campaign budget, but as the campaign proceeds you may need to adjust this budget.
To set your campaign budget in MSN adCenter, follow these steps:
Log in to your MSN adCenter account, and click the Campaigns tab.
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Testing ads is extremely important to web marketers. Google and MSN both offer a way to conduct an A/B test for your site. Different industries have very different keyword lists, and users themselves behave in very different ways when conducting searches and completing actions, such as sales or downloads.
The ads and keywords you would use for the wedding industry, for example, attract a certain kind of user who displays specific behavior on a website; you’d need to use different ads and keywords for the different type of user in the heavy-machinery industry.
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To do web marketing analytics, you need to understand exactly how referrers are tracked and what the tracking data means. It’s a bit technical, but don’t let it scare you off. You’re a smart person.
Here’s how referrer tracking works in the background as you (or your visitors) use the Internet:
You use a search engine, visit a website, or receive an e-mail message.
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Because in web marketing a session is defined as any one visit to your site, sessions are a good general measure of site use and load. Think of sessions as foot traffic in a traditional retail store: The same people might go in and out of the store, but that doesn’t matter. If the store’s full, it’s full.
In your traffic-reporting tool, you’ll find sessions either under a section called Sessions (surprise!
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Advanced ad scheduling in Google AdWords allows web marketers to set hours of the day and incremental bids for those hours. Incremental bidding is set on a scale of 100 percent; you can raise or lower your bids during different hours of the day.
Google AdWords allows you to bid both higher and lower than 100 percent, whereas MSN adCenter only allows you to bid in excess of 100 percent in increments of 10 percent.
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Google AdWords’ offers basic ad scheduling to web marketers. The Ad Scheduling option is the most complex system for adjusting your campaign costs to different traffic patterns. You’ll find this tool on the campaign settings page of each of your campaigns. By default, all campaigns are set to show your ads every day, all day, until the budget is depleted.
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Demographic bidding is a great tool for online marketing if you have a certain audience that you’re trying to reach. MSN offers you some ways to modify for demographics. If you know that your product is popular among women 35 to 49 years old, for example, you can increase the amount that you’re bidding to increase the chance that women in that age group will see and click your ad.
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Reaching potential customers by e-mail can be a very effective web marketing strategy. An e-mail marketing campaign can be detrimental, however, without some guidelines. Before you send your marketing e-mail, make sure that . . .
You have explicit permission to send the e-mail.
Your e-mail is CAN-SPAM-compliant.
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As a web marketer, you will find many helpful expansion tools and options in Google AdWords. When your account is active, you can add campaigns, ad groups, and keywords through the AdWords dashboard.
When you expand a PPC account, always think beyond just keywords — think of the account as a whole or, at the very least, by campaigns.
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After you create your initial campaign and ad group in MSN adCenter, you’ll want to expand them at some point. As a web marketer, you can add campaigns and ad groups, as well as find out how to increase the number of keywords in your keyword lists.
How to add a campaign
To add a campaign to your MSN adCenter account, follow these steps:
Open the account to which you want to add a campaign, and click the Campaigns tab.
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If you use a web designer outside your company for your business marketing, you can easily transfer copies of all your current HTML files, images, and photos by transferring your files with File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software.
It is important to keep copies of all the work being done for your company as backup in case something happens and the person running the website is unable to continue doing so.
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The Facebook segmentation tool, part of its ads platform, is a great research tool to focus your web marketing campaign. Facebook’s ad creation tool lets you test different segments — potential members of your audience grouped by interest or trait — and see how many people fit into each one. That lets you see which segments you should speak to through social media.
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Unique visitors reports in web marketing are a good measure of audience size, ad performance, and the effect of blog mentions or other noise — news reports about you or a competitor, for example — on your site.
Don’t use unique visitors to measure the following:
Per-visitor interest: Unique visitor data can tell you how many people come to your site.
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Of the main search engines, Google’s display network gives web marketers far more control of where your ads appear, when and to whom, as well as CPC and negative sites. Although total transparency isn’t available yet, you can get a better idea of which sites are working for and against you. The best way to manage your account effectively is to separate your display and search campaigns at the start.
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MSN adCenter offers a deeper keyword destination URL targeting to web marketers if you want to get into all the nooks and crannies of keyword-targeting tools. This level of keyword URL targeting is optional and won’t have a major effect on your account.
If you’ve organized and deployed your ad groups and keyword lists as efficiently as you can, with maximum relevancy, you don’t need these tools.
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MSN opts all new online ad groups into its search, content, and partner search networks by default. The search network is the search engines of Bing.com and Yahoo.com and is referred to as the unified marketplace. This means that ads shown in search results on Bing.com and Yahoo.com are serving ads from MSN adCenter, and you can’t tell which search engine an ad served on.
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MSN offers scheduling options to web marketers to give you some flexibility. adCenter allows you to target your customers by days of the week and by specific blocks of time but also at the campaign and ad group levels. If you enable ad scheduling for an ad group that is also enabled at the campaign level, the ad group settings will take priority.
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Quality Score is a one aspect web marketers can use to help in advertising campaigns. You can view your Quality Score in MSN to help determine what changes should be made to your site. You will need to raise your Quality Score if you want to lower a high cost per click or change where your ad appears on a search results page.
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Quality Score is a secret algorithm that Google uses to “score” each keyword relative to your web marketing account, the keywords in the ad group, the ad text, the landing page, your bid amount, and several other factors, some known and some not.
Quality Score is also applied to other areas of your account, like ads and the account itself, but the keyword level is the most visible and the easiest for you to make changes to in order to help yourself.
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Plagiarism can hurt your brand and your web marketing campaign. Because search engines don’t like duplication, an unauthorized copy of writing on your website can really hurt you. So you should check for folks who are copying your website at least as often as you check these statistics.
Keep another tab on your spreadsheet to record copycats and indicate when you contacted them.
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In web marketing, knowing how to write online copy is absolutely essential! You have a wealth of knowledge and information your customers have never seen or have forgotten. If you can clearly communicate that to them, you’ll attract loyal customers, demonstrate relevance and move up in the search rankings.
Try these five tips:
Think about what your customers most often ask and write detailed answers to each of those questions.
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A call to action in a web marketing e-mail is a statement that prompts your audience to complete one or more specific tasks in favor of your objectives. Even when your content is valuable, most consumers simply scan and delete your e-mails unless you prompt them with alternatives. If decreasing your deletion rate is one of your objectives, every e-mail you send needs to include a strong call to action.
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Writing a great title tag is critical to successful web marketing and involves more than putting your keywords first. Search engines display the keyword tag at the top of each item in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
A well-written title tag might increase the odds that a searching customer will click your listing.
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Your e-mail Subject line is a line of text that gives your audience a hint at the content in your web marketing e-mail. The most effective Subject lines are those that prompt your audience to open your e-mails to look for specific information.
Consistently coming up with good Subject lines is tough because most e-mail programs display only the first 30 to 50 characters, which gives you a limited amount of text to get your point across.
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Permission is required to send E-Mails to previously unused E-mail recipients for commercial web marketing purposes, there are two types of permission, Implied and Explicit.
Implied permission to send e-mail
Implied permission happens when someone shares her e-mail address with you in the course of normal business communications.
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Search engine optimization, or SEO, makes the most of web marketing by attracting Internet browsers to your website. By marketing with strong SEO, you expose your product to loads of potential customers. To ensure that shoppers who are looking for what you're selling can actually find your website; consider these search engine optimization tools and techniques:
Point all homepage links to http://www.
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You want to put your marketing plan to paper for your website design before you launch it, just as you would want to crunch numbers and run what-if scenarios before launching any new company. Collect information on these 25 top items when submitting your project scope to a website designer for a price quote:
Company information, including name, address, phone, and e-mail
How long you have been in business
The primary goal of your business (what you sell)
A description of your business in 25 words or less
A list of three groups of people who might benefit from your product or service
Your branding slogan
The main domain name for your website (go to uownitdomains.
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A complete web marketing strategy makes use of all electronic media, including mobile phones and other devices. Some keys to mobile marketing success include these pointers:
Don't be blinded by youth. Mobile marketing is applicable to all ages. Provide value, and everyone benefits.
Set objectives and success measures.
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You may be considering a trademark or copyright for your online marketing campaign. Before considering these, as a web marketer, you should know the difference between the two to know which applies to your ad.
Trademarks: A trademark can be a word, logo, phrase, or image that people or companies own to represent themselves or their businesses.
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Web marketing encompasses a wide range of electronic means to get your product in front of potential customers. Market your product through your business's website, through other people's websites, in their e-mail, or on their phones — nearly everywhere. Market your goods and services effectively by using tools like such as strong SEO terms and pay per click, and by analyzing your marketing campaign every day.
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To set web marketing benchmarks for page views per visit and time on site, you need to have been running your traffic-reporting tool for at least two to three months. That gives you enough data to set your benchmark, which you do by following these steps in Google Analytics:
In Google Analytics, from the Audience menu, click Overview in the sidebar on the left.
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Your site might not have any clear, well-defined conversion goals to glean web marketing data from if it doesn’t have e-commerce, lacks an e-mail newsletter (shame on you!) or doesn’t collect leads. Regardless, all sorts of measurable goals reside on your site. They might be hiding, but they’re there. You just have to coax them out.
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Traffic, in terms of web visitors, is key to web marketing data and it’s different aspects tell you different things about the visitors to your website. Traffic actually comprises five different ingredients:
Sessions (also called visits): A session is any one person visiting your website any one time. If someone visits your site ten times in a week, those visits count as ten sessions, whether she stayed on the site for 5 minutes or 50.
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Adobe Flash is a great way to create beautiful, interactive animations for your web marketing site. Unfortunately, search engines can’t read Flash animations for the following reasons:
Search engines don’t have the Flash plug-in. Remember, search engines visit your website as a super-simple web browser. Flash is a plug-in that viewers have to add to their web browsers — without it, they can’t see any of your Flash content.
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In web marketing, two very helpful strategies when choosing keywords is to compare your site to the competition and to check your industry to make sure you are advertising what you think you are. These simple tips can help take you to the top of your rankings.
Compare competition and search volume
If you’re facing 200 million other websites that are all vying for the No.
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As a business owner, the success or failure of your online marketing strategy determines whether food appears on your table next month and whether your bills get paid. You must be in control of any process that affects your lifestyle. Basic components you should be in control of include
Original website design files, including images, photos, and logos: In the event that your designer suddenly becomes unavailable through other employment, discontinued interest in your project, or even death, having access to the originals will allow you to transition easily to another service provider.
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In web marketing, one way to ensure visibility is to eliminate registration and login forms. Visitors often have to complete these forms before they can download some kind of premium content, such as a white paper, or before they can read some articles on a site. Companies put them in place because they want leads — they want contact information for interested potential customers, but there is a downside.
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Google+ is built around the idea of circles and web marketers can use this to their advantage. A circle is a group of related profiles or brand pages. You can create circles around any topics or ideas you want and then put profiles into one or more of those circles. You can make posts visible to a single circle, all your circles, or the public.
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Netvibes can be helpful to web marketers for tracking social media websites. To add content to Netvibes manually, follow these steps:
Go to the site, blog search, or other page to which you want to subscribe.
Right-click the RSS or Subscribe to RSS link.
From the shortcut menu that appears, choose the Copy Link Location command (or a similar one).
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To market your products, you need to make your webpage favorable to potential customers. Some people believe that no one wants to scroll down a webpage — that people would rather click for more information.
But, if you think about it, the only reason they click through links instead of scrolling is to get to a page where the correct information is featured.
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Specific elements on a webpage also enhance your marketing by encouraging visitors to take action. Here are some next-action design elements to try:
Red arrows: One of the most commonly used graphics online is a big red arrow pointing to something important. Why are they so popular? Because red arrows instruct people what to do, and people want to be directed.
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Duplicate content should be avoided in web marketing and Google provides a tool for detecting the repeated information. Nothing hurts a search engine’s quest for relevant content as much as finding the exact same words on two different pages. Duplication is bad for these reasons:
Duplication used to be another tactic used to fool the search engines.
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In web marketing, you should always avoid duplication. To avoid issues, make sure you have linked to your homepage the right way. To a search engine, all three of the following URLs are unique pages on the Internet:
www.<i>mydomainname.com</i>
<i>mydomainname.com</i>
www.<i>mydomainname.com</i>/index.html
Although they’re all pointing to the same page, search engines see each URL as unique.
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As a web marketer, avoiding excess code works to your advantage. Search engines like to see a high ratio of content to code: as few lines of code as possible per line of content. You have a few simple ways to remove code bloat and maximize the ratio of code to content.
Code using standards
If you code using XHTML and CSS standards, you can automatically minimize code bloat.
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While working to optimize your site for web marketing with search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to know how to avoid penalties. Website owners often make the mistake of looking for the Miraculous Path to Search Engine Greatness. One does not exist. SEO is a long process. You need to write, optimize, build links, and slowly work your way up.
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The upper-right quadrant (URQ) of a page on your business website is one of the most critical areas for marketing purposes because it’s the first place people see when they arrive.
For CustomPak, practically anything you would want to do on this website is featured in the URQ, including requesting a quote, contacting staff, viewing samples, calling for a quote, and making a request online.
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Membership websites are cumulative. If your marketing strategies can keep your member retention high, your income will double or triple or grow by even more over time. Member sites that are promoted correctly have little problem getting 100 paying members within a month or two.
A few things need to be ironed out before you go live with your new member website, however.
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Though it may seem trivial, color is an important marketing decision. Visitors to your website will react to color more than you might realize. That reaction can mean the difference between a visitor buying a product online with confidence versus a person being blinded by ghastly color combinations and hitting the Back button in less than three seconds.
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Website visitors make decisions based on the colors they see. Color should be an important marketing consideration in your website’s design so that you can attract the most customers.
Even modern screens display colors differently from one monitor to another. You may intend to have red text, but it could end up looking purple on some monitors.
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We buy things from people we know, like, and trust . . . and often even envy. Your marketing strategy on your website is an opportunity to start that relationship and then build upon it. Here are some ways to increase the human factor of any specific webpage, or the website overall:
Write from your heart, not from the dictionary.
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In web marketing, you can create content clusters, groupings of related content, to help build relevance. When you link two or more related pages to each other and to a central hub or index page from which a visitor can find all those related pages, you create a cluster of relevant content.
These links lend authority, just as links from other sites lend authority.
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Because most people search the Internet for answers to specific problems, a great marketing tactic is to create pages on your website to educate people on those issues. These educational content pages can develop into dozens, or even hundreds or thousands, in number for any website.
Educational content pages are
Fast and easy to create because they are short.
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To best market your products, you want your website to answer certain questions: What do people look like when they’re using your product or service? What lifestyle do they lead now that they finally took your advice? Good design means using photos well to describe more than just your company image, for example, the outcome of using your product or service.
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Branding is a simple concept to understand in marketing, yet it is sometimes a painstaking process to implement for a web-based business. Big companies pay marketing firms thousands of dollars to have expert teams produce branding strategies over weeks and months of brainstorming. So, if you’ve been struggling with your branding for a while, you’re not alone.
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After you create your website’s financial goals, create a similar spreadsheet to show how improving your conversion rates can reduce the amount of traffic you need to make the same revenue as well as the amount of sales per month.
To determine your required visitations per month to meet your sales revenue goals, use the following formula, where S is the number of sales you need, C is the conversion rate (which is a percentage), and V is the number of website visitors needed to produce those results:
S / C = V
Adding this formula to a spreadsheet is not only critical to your creation of a budget and overall Internet marketing plan, but it also enables your ability to dream a bit as well.
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A good, free web marketing tool which offers goal and e-commerce tracking is Google Analytics which is easily set up. To create your account, follow these steps:
Go to www.google.com/analytics.
Log in to your Google account or sign up for one.
If you don’t already have a Google account, you need to create one.
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In web marketing, you can save long hours later down the line by creating an SEO Worksheet. SEO can take a long time. Plus, changes you make today might impact your rankings months from now, so it’s important that you keep a record of relevant data and changes you make over time. That way, you can refer to those changes and better understand what worked and what didn’t.
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Successful web marketing ends in selling products or services, and these sales rely on the transfer of money, often through the transfer of credit card information.
You must have an arrangement with a company to accept credit card information on your website for your online transactions, using an Internet-capable merchant account.
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Pay per click (PPC) — also known as cost per click (CPC) — is a type of paid advertising used in web marketing, such as a paid search, sponsored listings, sponsored links, and partner ads. In a PPC model, the advertiser pays the host of the ad space if a user clicks its ads and goes to the destination URL or landing page — the site where the person ends up.
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The transaction page on your business’s website is where the goal of all your marketing efforts occurs; it is where buyers enter their contact information and credit card number. For the transaction page, you use a formal shopping cart or a custom form:
Shopping cart: The most popular way to sell products and services is through an Internet-based ordering system known as a shopping cart.
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Even a moderately successful web marketing affiliate program (in which other businesses can earn a commission for referrals to your website) can quickly propel your business to a new level that would’ve been impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to attain on your own.
How to set up affiliate tracking
All web-based affiliate programs require three essential components:
An affiliate center: This is where affiliates can add an account for themselves, check their sales, and get links, ads, and scripts to promote.
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Creating, marketing, and selling your own products and services on your own website can be a very profitable venture for your business. After all, you get to keep all the money after paying your costs.
Selling your own products and services can prove to be the most challenging because you have so much work to do before you can begin selling.
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Broken links stop search engines in their tracks. As a web marketer, dealing with these broken links may help ensure the success of your site. If a search engine reaches a broken link, it can’t find the page you intended (obviously) — but it might also give up on your website or reduce the relevance of your site.
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If you already have a marketing website up and running, identifying the most popular groups visiting your website is easy. Just look at the visitation statistics for the pages of your website to see the popular topics your audience is interested in.
However, if you’re just in the development phase of your website, find an industry-specific forum (a web-based discussion board) to find out what questions people are asking about your industry.
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Assuring that your website is usable by your marketing audience is partly the responsibility of the designer and partly the responsibility of the programmer. If something as simple as a link to another page isn’t functional, for example, a visitor will quickly become frustrated and leave the site searching for a better solution.
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Perhaps one of the most overlooked elements of marketing, specifically online, is the importance of having a meaningful logo for your website. If you are promoting a company on the web, a good logo is a vital ingredient: It helps you communicate a lot about your business to a website visitor in a fraction of a second.
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Once you have created your web marketing account in MSN adCenter, you many need to add billing information or edit your account settings. The use of this resource could help bring you the success you’ve been hoping for!
How to add billing information
Your account isn’t quite ready to run yet; you have to add payment information.
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If you’re working with a web designer for marketing on your website, you need to know whether your designer is formatting your website with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is important because a website can be designed on one computer yet appear totally different on the next. This is a browser and operating system issue as well as a display issue.
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Designing a business website is very similar to designing a store with product marketing in mind. In fact, your website really is a store — a virtual store on the Internet. Grocery store chains have spent millions of dollars in market research, watching and documenting how shoppers enter the store, turn right or left, and then graze their aisles.
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As a web marketer, finding “dead” pages will help keep your site running properly. Your site may have pages search engines never seem to find. Those pages may be buried deep in your site navigation, or you may have search roadblocks that shut out the search robots.
Whatever the case, dead pages are missed opportunities.
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One of the problems with joint venturing in web marketing is that it’s not new anymore. Internet-based joint ventures started as far back as 1995. Today, anyone with a substantial list and a visible profile probably has 50 to 100 people per month or more clamoring after him to do a joint venture.
Start with smaller joint ventures.
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A good SEO professional is someone you work with for months or years. She can advise you in web marketing strategy and help you make long-term improvements to your website. And she is also aware of your business objectives beyond higher rankings or more traffic. Try the following places to start your search:
Talk to other business owners.
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To gather more traffic for your website, you should consider marketing through a content site. A content site is designed to feature dozens — if not hundreds, or even thousands — of pages surrounding a specific topic. These content pages are each optimized for organic search engine positioning, often using an automated process.
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Generating traffic to your business website requires significant marketing through spending your own time to attract visitors, paying for visitors directly, or hiring helpers to do the work required to get the visitors. Getting a top spot on Google isn’t free — even your time has value.
Having said that, here are seven core categories to generate traffic to your website:
Free search: With all the hype suggesting how much time people spend tweeting on Twitter or posting on Facebook, just about everyone who uses the Internet still searches for something on Google, Yahoo!
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In web marketing, it’s important to understand what helps a site rank so that yours can be successful. Search engines want to know which website offers the best value for users when they search for a particular concept. These concepts are represented by key phrases. New York hotels, chocolate candy, bicycles, and wedding dresses are all examples of key phrases.
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Doubling or tripling the initial sale amount for new customer purchases on your website is a key to successful marketing. It begins with having more products to offer. These can be your own products or affiliate items. Make a list of all the products you could possibly promote, and you’re on your way to maximizing every new customer sale.
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For increasing leads and sales for marketing your business, proper use of the top horizontal navigation bar on your website (the links or buttons you see going across the top) is critical. The top navigation area serves one purpose — to get a visitor to go to another page.
Part of the trick is knowing what obvious utilities or content should be featured.
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You need to install a tracking code on your marketing website so that it can start sending data to Google Analytics to begin tracking visitor data.
This procedure varies depending on whether you have a blog site, a traditional site, or a CMS-driven site. (CMS stands for content management system.)
Access your site with whatever editing tool you’re using.
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Web marketers can further measure visit quality with bounce rate. A bounce occurs if someone visits one page of your website and then leaves without clicking to any other pages.
In Internet marketing, bounce rate can refer to two different things. As used here, bounce rate means the number of people who visit your site, view one page, and then leave without clicking to any other page.
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After tracking is set up for your web marketing site, the reporting tool shows you conversion data for your goals in a separate report. That data requires some interpretation. Here are a few examples of typical problems and opportunities you might find.
Identify costly keywords with Google Analytics
The first thing to look at is your list of keywords generating traffic to the site.
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Once you have goal funnel data, you need to know how to interpret and use it. Below is an example of a typical web marketing reporting tool report.
This report shows you, step by step, how many folks move through the process. Check your funnel reports for these items:
The biggest abandonment point: Here we show that only 53 percent of visitors proceed from their shopping baskets to the page where they enter their billing addresses.
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In web marketing, Ajax and DHTML are useful tools. However, to ensure proper visibility of your site to search engines, make sure you are using them appropriately and not actually blocking essential content.
Ajax allows you to build web applications. It allows a webpage to load new information without requiring a new page load.
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If you use WordPress for your web marketing, you should be aware that any web-based application that sports a URL to visit and an administration username and password to enter is inviting to potential hackers and thieves. WordPress is no exception.
Fortunately, multiple levels exist for which you can secure your WordPress website.
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Good marketing-focused web design is more than adding fancy colors and a visually exploding, movie trailer–like splash page; the layout needs to complement your branding while also inspiring visitors to take action.
The “action” is that your visitor either clicks one of the links provided in the layout or progresses through the content on the page.
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Search engines move from page to page on your website by following links. In web marketing, you need to provide a way to browse. Search engines can’t fill out forms, which means that they can’t use that search box you have on your site (ironic, huh?). They also can’t use a quick navigation box.
So, if you have any of the following, make sure that a way exists to click through and browse the entire database by using regular HTML links:
A location database that shows a list of local stores or other addresses
A searchable directory of products
An address book for your company’s staff
Any other data stored in a database and searched using a form
Say your site sells salads.
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When it comes to writing marketing promotional copy for your website, there comes a point where you need to stop presenting more features and benefits and start proving that your offer solves the problem. Here are several methods for proving to your visitors that your product or service solves their problem:
Use testimonials in your website copy.
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In web marketing, it’s important to make sure your site is visible. Checking your robots.txt file and meta robots tags is a good place to start. Errors with these can make your site invisible to visitors.
Check your robots.txt file
Go to
www.<i>yoursiteaddress</i>.com/robots.txt
.
You might get a
Page Not Found
error.
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A useful tool in web marketing is measuring your website with Panda. In early 2011, Google began an ongoing rollout of its biggest ranking algorithm change ever: Panda. Panda adds overall page and site “quality” as a ranking factor. Quality still matters, but Panda changes the way Google evaluates it:
Sites, not pages: Until now, Google has always looked at the Internet as a huge collection of pages, rather than a collection of websites.
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If you can attract website visitors for your business, you can turn that traffic into money — monetize — without marketing affiliate products or attempting to sell your own. Here are a few examples of monetizing traffic:
Google AdSense ads: AdSense is still one of the most popular methods of advertising on the Internet today.
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If you’re a local business in web marketing, try optimizing for local search. A top local search listing can drive customers faster than any other online marketing technique. Google and Bing are always experimenting with new ways to mix local search data into search results. Note how Google has added local information and reviews, and inserted several bicycle shops into the top 10 for seattle bicycles.
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Depending on the size of the joint-venture web host’s company, you might be expected to conduct a formal presentation of the benefits of marketing your product to a group of staff with your plan. If you start small, however, many joint ventures can be assembled over a cup of coffee at your local coffeehouse or sometimes even via a phone call.
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Joint-venture hosts have a substantial public following, which can make them a great asset for web marketing for your business. They got to where they are because they (more often than not) genuinely care about people. When you arrive at your meeting with your potential joint-venture host, be ready to promote a joint-venture opportunity with the host’s audience in mind:
How will his followers benefit from your product?
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Most web marketing reporting tools don’t show referrer data front and center on the main dashboard. You need to drill down to find and retrieve it. Using Google Analytics as an example, the following walks you through the steps of finding your referring sites and introduces the common metrics you see along with those sites.
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After you set up your account in AdWords, you’ll need to set up billing to get your ads running and your web marketing on its way to success. Follow these steps:
Click the Billing tab and choose Billing Preferences to open the Billing Options page.
Set your country location and currency.
You can’t change this information later so be sure it’s correct before moving on.
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Setting up goal tracking for your web marketing site is straightforward — if you know the goal page in Google Analytics. Broken or badly configured shopping carts where the last checkout page was viewed aren’t so easy to track. Be sure to test and verify that your goal page really is unique within your site, and that multiple goals don’t share a single page.
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iGoogle is one of the simplest social media desktop tools you can use for online marketing. If you already have Gmail or use another Google service, you can simply add it to your existing account. Plus, it integrates with Google’s various other services.
The only downside about iGoogle is this: You don’t have much control over how your page looks.
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Because in web marketing you want the most accurate numbers, set up a filter to exclude visits from everyone who works at your organization. Your Google Analytics package won’t distinguish between customers and folks at your company unless you tell it to.
That kind of filter depends on the IP addresses used by your office.
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WordPress can be an excellent host for a marketing website for your company. The following steps offer an overview of the steps for installing a WordPress website and then getting it up and running:
Register a domain name with keywords related to your industry, or use your company name.
Your core domain name should reflect your business name, but your ancillary website can focus on industry-related keywords.
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Google+ is a relative newcomer on the social networking scene. It allows you to rate and rank to assist your online marketing campaign. Unlike a bunch of false starts that Google has had in this space, Google+ seems here to stay: It’s gained 100 million users in months, and Google’s promoting the network using its dominance of search.
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Some reporting packages, such as Adobe Site Catalyst allows the web marketer to track a basic goal funnel by using the conversion funnel tracking or the fallout report builder. For other packages, such as Google Analytics, you need to know the unique address of each page in the checkout process and then add those addresses to a goal funnel report.
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When designing your website for marketing your products, be aware that website visitors rarely read text word for word; instead, they scan information and wait for something to catch their interest. One important element of a website that captures people’s interest and attention is font size and font type.
Font size: Some designers like to push the limits by using huge fonts or really tiny text.
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If you have a search box on your website, it makes sense to track what folks type into it. You can find out a lot about your audience, which is what web marketing is all about.
To set up a site search, follow these steps:
Log in to Google Analytics.
Select the website for which you want to track site search.
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In web marketing, if unique visitors are the people, page views are their footprints. Page views are the measure of interest in specific areas of your site. Most traffic-reporting tools will give you a few different ways to look at page views:
Overall page-view count for your entire site: Look for a Pageviews report to see the aggregate view.
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Many of the major search engines offer tools to web marketers that will help you with enhancing your site to ensure its search presence. These tools can be very helpful when developing your site.
How to use Google Page Speed
Google Page Speed lets you evaluate site performance. It then provides you with specific guidelines for giving your site a speed boost.
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Squeeze pages are short and simple marketing web pages that introduce additional content available to readers — but only if they’re willing to register by providing an e-mail address.
A squeeze page is a great way to accept targeted traffic for a very specific topic of interest and inspire visitors to register to be on your mailing list.
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When someone buys something from a webpage, it’s known as a conversion because the marketing methods converted the purchaser from a visitor to a paying customer. Only after you have proven yourself to your visitors can you focus on converting visitors to paying customers.
The following outline provides a step-by-step process that you can work through to create website copy that converts visitors to customers.
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When developing your marketing, it is important to keep in mind that you have five seconds or less before a visitor to your website decides to take further action with you or your company. The first line of copy on your page needs to prove to your visitors that they arrived at the informational page they were looking for.
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Before someone takes the final step to making your web marketing successful and uses a credit card to make a purchase from your business through your online ordering system, a series of questions go through his mind. Many of these questions can and should be addressed in your sales letter or on your product sales page.
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Because your web marketing e-mail list is an asset, offering an incentive in exchange for an e-mail subscription is really the least you can do to thank and reward your most valuable contacts.
Offering incentives for joining your e-mail list can reward your business in at least two ways:
Increased sign-ups: The number of people willing to share their contact information with you is likely to increase if they feel that they’re getting something of value in return.
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Sales are the final goal of web marketing. From a revenue standpoint, it is absolutely critical to set up your shopping cart to sell online — and to sell well.
Shopping Cart Setup Action
Benefit
Customize the look of the order page to match the appearance of
the rest of your website.
Users aren’t distracted by an abrupt change in look and
feel.
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In web marketing, the best way to get visitors to your site is to think like them when searching and to choose the right keywords. The truth is, keywords aren’t the focus of a good SEO strategy — visibility, authority, and good writing are.
Here, you will find out how to pick the right keywords to bring traffic to your business website.
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How many websites have you visited where you find yourself pulling out your credit card ready to buy the marketed product, but the sales page never gives you a link or an Add to Cart button to click? Make it easy for your visitors to take the next step with you:
Display a phone number in plain view on every page of your website.
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Luckily, as a web marketer, you don’t have to guess to find keywords. You can use some of the great tools available to help you with your initial brainstorming to optimize your keywords.
How to use keyword services
Several companies have launched keyword services designed just for search engine optimization pros looking for the right targets.
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If you understand why search engines exist, you can get them to work for you in your web marketing business. So, here’s a quick lesson in why search engines exist and how you can use them to make money.
Search engines deliver relevance. Relevance means that visitors click on search results and are happy with what the search engine found for them.
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In web marketing, anytime you have multiple steps in a conversion process, you have a funnel. Some funnels occupy multiple pages but only a single endpoint and goal, such as the checkout process. A multiple-page, lead-generation form works the same way.
These point-to-point processes are linear. The visitor starts at one end of the funnel and concludes on the final goal-conversion page.
Marketing
Articles
The CAN-SPAM Act requires you to include certain content in your e-mails. Include the following in your e-mails to stay CAN-SPAM–compliant:
Provide a way for your subscribers to opt out of receiving future e-mails. You’re required to remove anyone who unsubscribes from your e-mail list permanently within ten days of the unsubscribe request, and you can’t add that person back without his explicit permission.
Marketing
Articles
In web marketing, you will experience flux and, at times, your numbers may fall. Relax! Okay, that may be impossible. But, if you see your organic search traffic and rankings start to plunge, consider these possible causes:
The search engines might be updating their algorithms. If you’re playing above board, your old rankings will likely return.