I haven't used this blog in over 4 years now because I've been busy marketing my own website for my children's book The Christmas Web - A Family Tradition.

The Christmas Web - A Family Tradition

My attempts to move my website up to the top of Google Search ranks have not proven to be very successful, most of my sales over the past two years have come from Christmas Bazaars throughout the Southeast and Midwest.  This is a lot of work and front-end expensive, thus I've decided to make an all out effort to get my site to the first page of Google Search for the following Keywords: Christmas Tradition, Elf Ideas, Shelf Elf Ideas and Christmas Elf Tradition.

The first thing I've done is to SEO my website for my Keywords and I've uses SEOquake to give me guidance on how my site compares to my competition.  I feel I'm in good shape for optimization.  Now I'm in the process of building links.  I've purchased two books by R.L. Adams that have been very helpful in guiding me to online sources for link-building and helping me to understand how to avoid any Google penalties for using Black Hap Practices.

I'll use this blog to keep anyone that's interested in my progress to build my online business around The Christmas Web.  I am writing another blog about the making and marketing of The Christmas Web.

The Power of Email Marketing

If your not using email to promote your business, convey information, or encourage your existing clients and patients to take action then your not taking advantage of one of the most effective marketing tools available to you today.

Here are some of the key advantages of reaching your audience through email:

Email allows you to present your message as you want to when you want to present it to your clients. Rather than wait for them to find their way to your website you are initiating the continuation and building of the relationship. You are keeping your business top of mind, which creates additional business and referrals.
Email will drive website traffic. An effective website is a vehicle for presenting the latest information about your business. You can’t assume that your clients are finding their way to your business every day, every week, or every month. A well constructed email Newsletter will bring them to your website and will directly increase your business volume.
Email is the best Return On Investment business generator. Unlike any other advertising vehicle you are able to track who reads your message, what path they follow to and from your message, and what their response is to your message. You are then able to change and massage your message to improve your results.


Building an effective email campaign

What results are you looking for?
Be specific;
I want to increase our monthly sales by 10%.
I want to get 5 new clients each month.
I want to increase this segment of my business by 25%

CREATE A COMMUNICATIONS CALENDAR FOR THE YEAR

I’m going to send out a monthly newsletter to my existing clintel. My staff will gather an email address from each of our existing clients. Our newsletter will contain news in our filed of practice, it will focus on timely product offerings and it will contain three calls to action each month.

BUILD THE “PERFECT” EMAIL

There are proven elements to a successful eNewsletter:
A short compelling subject line – your subject line can increase your open rate by 50%.
Build in links to your website – each story should present s snippet of information with the balance on your website.
Your should contain at least three calls to action; set an appointment, receive a brochure on this product, attend our upcoming seminar.
Coordinate your website with your newsletter
Too often a newsletter is sent out without a supportive website, if your website is not built to achieve your specific goals with calls to action that are easy to activate your newsletter will be just another expenditure witch produce no measurable results. Internet Solutions, Inc. 2009

TEST, Measure Results, TEST, Measure Results TEST, Measure Results!
With each newsletter sent you should be checking your analytics to determine the following:
Your Bounce Rate – how many bad email addresses do you have and who are they.
Your Open Rate – how many of your recipients opened the newsletter and how did this open rate compare with past newsletters.
Your Click Rate – how many followed the path to your website and which articles had the most click throughs.
Your Goal Achievement Rate – how many new clients did you generate, how many appointments did you set, how many referrals were generated.

Build your mailing list
If done right your monthly newsletter will become your best marketing vehicle, so the more people that you are speaking to each month the more your business will grow. Marketing is all about being top of mind when your services are needed, and there is no more effective way to stay top of mind then through a newsletter and a well constructed website.

The Future of Email Marketing
The web is a rapidly changing landscape. The biggest changes in web marketing relates to mobile marketing. How does your audience read your newsletter on that tiny screen on their cell phones? How do you incorporate social networking to make your newsletter accessible to a whole difference subset audience?

What are your options?
You can ignore the development of Internet Marketing.

You can get ahead of the curve and develop an Internet Market.

Click here for your Free Website Analysis

PageRank: Is it important?

PageRank is a web page ranking system developed by Google and named after Larry Page one of Googles co founders. It’s used by Goggles Internet search engine to assign a numerical weighting to each website page on the web. The purpose of this rating is to measure the relative importance of the page within the websites category.

Proper Search Engine Optimization will provide the search engine crawlers with the necessary information to properly catagorize a website. Once a website is properly categorized where that website appears in search is dependent on the relative importance of that website to its web category.

To achieve a high PageRank your website must acquire links to other sites within your category. Each site below has achieved a level of relative importance. Page C, below will have a higher rank than page E, even though it has fewer links; the link that it does have has a much higher level of relevance then the cumulative level of relevance achieve by page E as a result of its multiple links. As a result of page A’s one incoming link and no outgoing links it’s level of relative importance is higher then those pages that have both incoming and outgoing links. Thus reciprocal links are not advisable unless the incoming link has a higher PageRank than your receiving page.






Page Rank runs from NA ( not categorized) then 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest Page Rank. Page Rank is not as important to the success of your website as proper Search Engine Optimization, but it does give you a means of monitoring the relative importance of your website.

On October 14, 2009, Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that the company had removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools section. Her post said in part, "We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true." As of the time of this post Google has not remove the Page Rank tool from it’s Webmaster Tool option available.

Some companies offer to sell high PageRank links to webmasters, but this strategy to build Page Rank should be approached with caution. It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase your link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned that if such sites are discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring Page Rank, their links will be devalued.

The Search Engine Results Page, or SERP, is the actual result returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. This is what you see after you enter your search criteria and click on SEARCH. The SERP consists of a list of links to web pages with associated text displaying the pages title, description and URL or web address.


The SERP rank of a web page refers to the placement of the corresponding website link on the SERP, where higher placement means higher SERP rank. The SERP rank of a web page is not only a function of its Page Rank, but depends on a relatively large and continuously adjusted set of factors, commonly referred to by Internet marketers as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is aimed at achieving the highest possible SERP rank for a website or a set of web pages.
Once SEO is in place, Page Rank is achieved and website traffic is growing the next step is to implement conversion strategies that are designed to turn website visitors into new client of patients.

I choose to think of it like a retail store; you build your store in a good location, your stock your store with the best merchandise at a competitive price, the traffic comes through the door, now you have to make it easy for them to buy from you. The “easy to buy from you” are the conversion strategies.
Free Website Analysis

Your Customers Words Carry More Weight Than Yours

Testimonials are critical to any website that's marketing professional services.

They provide "social proof," suggests author Robert Cialdini in his insightful social psychology book Influence: Science and Practice. This principle states we determine what's correct by reinforcing our search for what is correct for us. A testimonial is in fact a non personal referral and we all know the best source of new business is a referral. So if referrals are available through testimonials why wouldn’t you have them on every page of your website?

The day of asking your neighbor over the fence for a suggestion as to where you can obtain quality professional services has past. The pace of our society and available technology has replaced the neighbor’s advice with the internet. We regularly read of a website achieving traffic of 9 million visitors a month, this is because people tent to move in mass.

"As a rule, we make fewer mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than by acting contrary to it" stated Cialdini. "Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do.”

The simple truth is you can present the latest technology, all your credentials, your years of experience but a testimonial from someone that is respected can sometimes more effectively persuaded people to take action.

Giving and Receiving Testimonials

It’s easy to grasp the benefit of having someone that you respect place a testimonial on your website, but have you considered tie benefit of giving a testimonial to a website? “Links”
Links are the key to website power on the internet. “He who has the most relevant back-links rises to the top of search.” You can have a perfectly Search Engine Optimized website, but if your competitor has more relevant back-links you’ll never move past them in search. So if your link is constructed properly your testimonial on someone else’s website will create a win-win exchange. It important that you understand the value of one-way links and avoid link mills; both which could cause your website more damage than value.

The web is all about “search” so your testimonial needs to be scanable to achieve maximum impact. Here are some guideline to writing effective testimonials that will convey trust, confidence and credibility.

Make It Identifiable: Use full names, identify the company when applicable, and include a date. John D. is not a full name and creates suspicion rather than credibility.

Keep It Brief: One or two specific points and a long story use your website keywords which will add to your optimization.

Speak To Their Concerns: All professions carry baggage, address that baggage in your testimonials. The baggage is the question that all prospects ask. “Do you have to wait hours to see him?” “Does she take time with you?” “How long has he been in the field?” When people are uncertain, they increasingly look to others to decide how to act.

Speak To Your Market: If your target market is woman, get testimonial from woman, if you’re going after the common man use the common man. Take your queue from the commercials that you see on TV. Cialdini noted the increased use of "average-person-on-the-street" testimonials on TV because advertisers know an effective way to sell a product to ordinary users is to demonstrate other "ordinary" people like and use it.

One Per Page: Don't use a “Testimonial Page” no one wants to read that many and no one will find it. There’s nothing wrong with having a testimonial on every page if it fits your website design.

Let Karma Work For You

Your website is built around you marketing your services yet your current clients and or patients words will carry more weight then your words on your website. Knowing this get in the habit is offering testimonials to those professionals that provide you quality service and let that link come back to you.

What others say about you can carry much more weight than your own words. Arm your website with your clients' words. It's a powerful and economical way to generate trust, credibility and sales.




Kerry J Grinkmeyer
kj@bestofUS.com

BestofUS Internet Marketing Offers Search Engine Optimization and Link Building Services

Search Engine Optimization and Link Building experts generate measurable results for professionals with social media marketing campaigns and one-way link building services.

By focusing on your websites underlying quality, search engine optimization as well as using some creativity to get other websites to link to your website, one-way link building can propel a website to the top of Search. Most Internet marketing campaigns are “here today – done tomorrow efforts,” but BestofUS’s Internet Marketing services combine an optimized website a good “news hook,” in an optimized bolg post, a well-researched list of influential bloggers, and blogger outreach best practices.

In the industry there’s currently a lot of talk about how link-baiting is the best way to build back links to your website. There are several underlying characteristics of link-baiting that that make it a viable and sustainable strategy.
The key is to post a blog and or issue a press release that contains information the sheds a new light of a hot topic. As an example of two of the hottest topics to the American public today are the economy and the current debate around national health care.

Social media marketing campaigns
Let’s assume you’re a Financial Advisor and you have access to the email addresses of 500 of the top financial advisors in the United States.

You send them a survey and ask them questions about their feelings about the economy and the stock market over the next six months. Then you blog your survey results and copy all the leading bloggers in the financial markets. Your blog is part of your website, watch the links build, watch your Google Ranking climb, watch your website traffic spike. You have just established you and your website as one of the most relevant financial websites on the Internet.
If you’re a physician, or a dentist or a chiropractor take the same strategy and apply it to the national health care debate and achieve the same results.

In every profession there’s a “hot topic”, real estate, taxes, health care, the economy; if you have access to the opinions of other professionals like yourself, through an email survey you can create a “news hook” that will propel your website to the top of relevance to your industry on the Internet.

BestofUS Internet Marketing’s home website is BestofUS.com which lists over 65,000 of the best professionals in the United States.

We’ve also identified the 50 most influential bloggers within the ten professions that we list on BestofUS.com to send a release before we post our blogs or press releases.

Building One-Way Links
This type of campaign can generate more then 190 blogs posts. If the information is well documented and presented it can be picked up by news services which produce some of the most valuable relevant links on the Internet. This is the kind of campaign that can result in a Google Home Page Ranking of #4 to #5 and over 200 back links.

SEO and One-Way Link Building Services
If you are interested in learning more about BestofUS Internet Marketing Campaigns, email me and I'll follow-up with a phone call.
Kerry J Grinkmeyer kj@bestofUS.com
www.BestofUS.com

Vietnamese Internet Marketing

I spent the past month in Asia (Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam). I went for a vacation but I got an education, I spent 30 days in China in 2007; the difference between China and these countries is mind boggling. I went to answer some questions that I had about the Vietnam War as well as to gather information for investment purposes. If you’re interested in my observation you can read my blog: http://bestofustravelers.blogspot.com/

I did learn something about marketing that is applicable to the Internet and how you use your website. We stayed in the Indochina Hotel in downtown Hanoi. Each morning when we came out of our hotel, there were 15 in our group, there was a lady at the curb selling a selection of hats, tee-shirts and postcards. She was there when we left in the morning and when we arrived back in the evening. It wasn’t until the second day that I realized that she was also at the temples, monuments and restaurants that we traveled to during the day; the same lady.

So on the third morning I watched her out the back window as we left the hotel and saw that she put her merchandise in the saddlebags of her scooter and followed our van where ever we went, each day she changed her selection of merchandise and varied her outfit so that most of our group didn’t realize what was happening, and each day she made sales.

This Vietnamese lady had identified her prospects, Americans, after I’m sure substantial research and she continued dripping us until we bought for four days until we left Hanoi. I’m sure if she had my email address I’d still be hearing from her.

You have a website, if it’s properly optimized you’re getting visitors, you should be giving them numerous opportunities to leave their email address behind, and you should have an email program in place to drip your message to them at least once a month. Like the lady in Vietnam on her scooter once you’ve identified your best prospects if you’re not providing them an opportunity to buy, they’ll most likely become someone else’s client tomorrow.

Unlike the lady in Vietnam you don’t have to buy a scooter and gasoline and follow your prospects around to put your message in front of them, technology will do that for you, all you need to do is write a valued message that will result in a response.

Do You Need a Blog on Your Website

You’ve heard that one of the ways to improve the traffic to your website is to incorporate a blog. Before you pull out the pen and paper and start penning your first words of wisdom or share your latest piece of knowledge, take a moment and determine just what it is that you are hoping to accomplish and what you have to put in place to for your blog to achieve the results that your looking for.

Let’s start with a question does a blog attached to a company website improve the websites search rankings?

The answer is “Yes” if the blog is done right, and addresses these four issues that will improve a sites ranking whether it be additions through a blog or other parts of the site.

1. The blog provides you a place to regularly add relevant content to your website, and search engines love fresh content and fresh content keeps visitors coming back.


2. A blog provides you and opportunity to encourage back links.


3. A blog will help you build a community around your website. Thorough your blog you will come in contact with other people in your industry, you’ll exchange ideas, you’ll build your reputation, and you’ll develop a following of people who’ll spread the word about your posts through Linked In, Face Book, and Twitter.


4. Through your blog you can set up RSS feeds that will multiply your exposure which often leads to more links, which leads to higher rankings, which leads to more clients.

So, all in all a blog is an excellent part of turning a website into a marketing tool, but there are more decisions that need to be made before you start bloging.

Are you going to host your new blog on the company site or at another domain line Blogspot or Word Press?

I recommend that you host your blog on your company site, that way all the benefits tie directly to your company site; the back-links, the RSS feeds and any email addresses left behind are tied directly to your company site. Besides any blog visitor are only clicks away from where you’re doing business.

Now that the blog is on-site how where does it go and how should it be structured? You have a choice of setting up in its own folder (www.bestofus.com/blog), or a separate subdomain (www.blog.bestofus.com/).

My advice…option#1…in its own folder. This will give you better results with Google search.
Now you need bloging software to write your blog in. I currently have twelve blogs, 10 with Word Press and 2 with Blogspot. I find that I am more comfortable in Word Press and that I can add more features through their plug-ins that help be optimize my blog and build traffic.

Hold on don’t start bloging yet, here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your blog. Most these can be achieved through the plug-ins offered through Word Press.

Proper structure of your URLs/Permalinks. Each post has its own identity, some use numbers in sequence. It should look like this: (www.bestofus.com/blog/DoYouNeedaBlogOnYourWebsite)

Optimize your description, title, and Alt tags. Treat each post as another web page so that it can be easily categorized and ranked by the search crawlers.

Create a Sitemap. You need to build this and you’ll find a plug-in to help you get it in place.
Directory of your best posts. Place this directory on your Side Bar so the readers can easily find the best you have to offer.

Link to your Social Media. You should have a snippet of any new posts appear on your Linked In, and Face book pages there are a number of services that can do this for you.

You should now be ready to start bloging. You’ll want to adapt the same promotional, link building, visitor to client conversion and SEO strategies that you have in place for your company site into your blog.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy bloging, the blog will build traffic to your website and you’ll have to turn new clients away. Remember the Internet is relatively new and it is growing each day, it you jump in now you’ll be light years ahead of your competition and as it changes you’ll be in a position to adapt. The Internet is the best marketing tool you have ever been presented, don’t ignore it any longer.