Internet and Coffee

Link Building Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of designing your web site to rank well in the search engines. There are many factors used to determine how your site ranks.

At our upcoming New York Internet Marketing Seminar I will be discussing Search Engine Marketing Strategies in detail.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Acesse and other major search engines place a high priority on relevant content and the number of high quality, relevant inbound links coming into to your site.

Search Engine Spiders

The search engines have electronic robots, or “Spiders” that go out and “Crawl” in search of new content. With good content on your site the Spiders will find and index new content on your site, and make it available in the search results.

Relevant Content

The number one priority for any web site is to provide good content. The key is, your content needs to be relevant to the search audience you are intending to attract. It is best to keep your sites content focused in a specific niche, topic or theme.

Example: Content about Caribbean Travel would not be relevant to a Dog Training site.

Content is food for the Search Engine spiders. Your content needs to be updated on a regular basis, to stay fresh in the eyes of the search engines. Sites with frequently updated content, tend to rank higher in the search engines.

Link Building Strategy

Every site should have a Link Building Strategy. The number of relevant Inbound Links to your web site play a major part in your sites Search Engine Ranking.

There are several ways to get Inbound Links to your site. When you are implementing an effective Link Building Strategy it is important to link from other sites that have and content that is relevant to your site and that have a good ranking in the search engines.

• Links from other Web Sites
• Links from Search Engines
• Links from Indexes and Directories
• Links from Article Directories
• Links fro Press Release Sites
• Links from Blogs (Posts of Comments)
• Links from Bookmark Sites
• Links from Social Network Sites

The secret is to maintain those inbound links to ensure that your website will maintains and ultimately improve it’s ranking in the search engines.

This process can be extremely difficult and time consuming and should be delegated to an in-house SEO expert or third party firm, like iNetGlobal.

An iNetGlobal Internet Marketing Consultant, can give you advice on how to develop or improve your online marketing strategy, including a Link Building Strategy that is custom designed for you.

To find out more on how iNetGlobal can help your business, attend one of our Free Internet Marketing Seminars, coming to your area soon.

iNetGlobal Provides Internet Marketing Services
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4 Components of a Successful Internet Marketing Strategy

Most companies start internet marketing by searching for an internet marketing services provider. They may get lucky and find a good one. But most companies are going to end up hiring a firm that only possesses half of what is required to make a client successful.

If you'd like to be one of the lucky ones, you should learn how to detect a good internet marketing services firm from a not-so-good one. Make sure the strategy that your web design and internet marketing firm presents to you covers the following 4 pieces of a successful internet marketing strategy:

Data

Internet marketing starts with data. I was speaking with a small business owner the other day and I told her that I would take a look at the data from our analysis of her site. She asked me, "How do you have any data without looking at my webstats?". That's a logical question.

But, I'm not taking about traffic logs. I'm talking about data that is culled from the web about your website, your competitors' websites, search engines, blogs and social media sites. 

Your website isn't an island on the web. A lot of factors determine whether you're likely to get much traffic from search engines, other blogs and social media sites. A good firm will be able to estimate how much traffic you can get without looking at what you get now.  They should also be able to tell you how much work it'll take to get that traffic. 

This is the main reason why the HubSpot team created our free Grader tools including Website Grader and Twitter Grader. Although website grader will tell you what mistakes you're making, there are a bunch of tools included in HubSpot's internet marketing software that give much more actionable information to aid with keyword research, on-page seo, off-page seo and social media marketing.

But there is other data you should look at, too. If you plan to do a lot of pay per click advertising, you should start your research with Compete or SpyFu. If you're looking for more advanced social media data, check out Techrigy, Radian6 and Nielsen Online.

If you're interviewing firms to design your website or plan your internet marketing strategy, they should be presenting data to you that helps you start calculating the traffic, leads and sales you'll get from internet marketing. 

Software

What software will power your website and internet marketing? You must ask this question of any internet marketing services firm you're interviewing. Very few firms have this figured out. There are still way too many web designers creating websites by hand coding them from scratch. And there are way too many websites that aren't built on an internet marketing platform. Most design firms will start pitching you by showing you mockups of pretty websites. Push back! Tell them that you know that the software is ultimately what's going to enable an ROI.

What software do you need? We're obviously a bit partial here. At some point, I will write a blog post called, "The Idiots Guide to Recreating HubSpot's Internet Marketing Software". But, suffice to say that the software that powers your website should include all of what HubSpot's software includes. Don't just stop with a content management system. Make sure you can launch landing pages and edit the right spots on your pages to do SEO. Make sure you have a marketing analytics package that knows where your leads are coming from. Based on my experience, it's very beneficial if your SEO analytics tools gather data from your analytics package and your customer relationship management integrates with your landing pages.

Depending on your circumstance, there are some other tools you should consider. If you run a very high volume site, you should consider a high end analytics package like Omniture. You should definitely start email marketing. For small businesses, you should consider simple email marketing tools like Constant Contact, Aweber or Exact Target.  If you're a larger business with lots and lots of leads to nurture, you should consider tools like Eloqua, Marketo or InfusionSoft. But, you should use logic to govern your software selection. Askyourself, "Will the software give you all the tools you need to controlthe traffic you want to attract, the leads you need to generate, and the sales you want to make?"

Skills

In a post a few months back, I argued that "time" is the most important ingredient in your internet marketing strategy. I still believe this. There is nothing about internet marketing that requires an advanced degree. If you have the right data and right software in place, all you really need is an interest in writing and the analytical skills required to read a graph. These skills are usually possessed by your average 11th grader. 

However, if you're going to outsource your internet marketing to a firm, you should find a firm that has a stable of writers at their disposal; a quant or two on staff to plot your strategy; and a grunt or two to help with your repetitive social media and link building activities. Also consider hiring a liberal arts major out of college or a journalist. Just make sure they can read graphs.

No matter who you hire, give them the data and software they need. Then, measure them based on their ability to generate leads for you. If you're the expert at your business, your product, your customers' challenges... don't expect them to work in a vacuum. Whether you staff internally or outsource, you'll need to guide their activities, motivate and inspire them and teach them about your business. Just like hiring any new employee, don't expect them to produce leads in a vacuum. Internet marketing isn't magic. There are no such things as magic internet marketing skills. Or SEO pixie dust.

Network

Since a well executed internet marketing strategy requires your time whether you outsource, do it yourself or hire someone, "lack of time" isn't the best reason to outsource. However, a really good reason to outsource certain inbound marketing tasks is because the web is a network and your network is probably not on the web. A good internet marketing services firm has been creating content, building links, leveraging social media sites, blogging, etc for themselves and their clients for years.

For example, I have 700 readers on my blog, 500+ connections on LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter, know lots of webmasters and have built 1,000s of links. If you could hire me to help you with your internet marketing, it'd be like hiring my sales coach to work a room with you in Central MA. If you were to walk into a networking event in Worcester, MA with Rick Roberge, you'd meet a lot of people very quickly. If you walked in alone, you might not get to talk to anyone worth talking to. The same thing applies on the web. Working with a firm with a similar network online as I have, can help you make progress much quicker.  Without their help, and the help from their established networks on the web, you'd be the new guy in the room for awhile. Working with a firm can help you build your online network much quicker. Your firm's network will come in handy when launching your blog and building your readership, establishing credibility on social media sites, and sourcing content and building links for SEO.

This may be obvious now, but you'll be much more successful if you can connect online with your real world clients, suppliers and networking partners. If you can get your whole network blogging or using LinkedIn effectively, you'll stand a much better chance of success yourself. 

As you can imagine, PR firms that have "taken to the web" are usually the best at building online networks.  They have the right skills. Web developers are usually not so good at this stuff. 

Data + Software + Skills + Network = Internet Marketing Success

Are you successful online? Do you have all 4 bases covered? Or did you skip one? What data do you use? What software are you using? What skills did you build internally? What tasks are you outsourcing and why? Are you building your network online? Moving your network online? Did you hire someone to help you with building your network online?

Share your experiences in the comments.

 

 

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New York Internet Marketing Service

We are coming to New York this weekend for the iNetGlobal/AdPacs Rally. This is our 1st ever New York Internet Marketing Seminar. We will be bring our own brand of Internet Marketing Services to the local market.

We will be in Flushing. Downtown Flushing is the largest urban center in Queens, and home to the second largest Chinatown in New York City. There are people of all nationalities but predominantly East Asians, specifically Chinese and Koreans.

Flushing will be our foothold on the New York market. We have a small group of iNetGlobal Consultants there and we plan to build our business to become a dominant Internet Marketing Service company in the New York area.

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How Does Your Company Stack Up Against the Fortune 500? Better Than You’d Think.

This post was co-authored by HubSpot's Peter Caputa and David Criswell. David is a sales professional, former business owner and social media addict currently employed as a corporate sales trainer. When not on Twitter, Linked In, Facebook or reading the Hubspot Blog he is busy training for the 2009 Ironman Lake Placid. 

The idea is not new that small companies are more nimble and can move quicker than big companies in just about every operational area: bringing new products or services to market, recruiting and hiring, and of course, marketing.

But, Fortune 500 companies have more money! 

Who cares?

Besides bigger budgets, Fortune 500 companies don't have any capabilities that small businesses don't have. On the web, companies of all sizes have access to the same low-cost marketing tools.

For a small fixed cost of a few hundred dollars per month and a few hours per week, a small business can do everything they need to do in order to acquire new customers:

• hosting their website on a web-based cms
• optimizing their website to increase search traffic using tools like Website Grader. (The Fortune 500 is apparently still trying to figure SEO out.)
• their time to write some posts on their blog
• a discussion via Twitter (or some other social medium) with a prospect.
• creating great offers and building optimized landing pages to capture more leads.

It is reasonable to say that the relative cost of acquiring a customer leveraging these activities compared to "old" marketing (print advertising, direct mail, tv advertising, cold calling, etc) is low. While Fortune 500 Marketers continue to spend ridiculous amounts of money on both online advertising and traditional marketing methods (eg $1.5+ billion of television advertising that will happen this year),  it's not hard to see that online customer acquisition through inbound marketing methods is a lot less costly to leverage.

But, big business is getting into Social Media!

So what? 

It's reasonable to apply the principle of the long tail to the idea of big business getting into social media marketing.  There may be a few big companies that dominate the spending on "new" marketing, but this will only bring more consumers - theirs and yours - into the social media circle. However, it's the 25 million small businesses that can then more effectively use this "new" marketing to capture enough customers to have a healthy growing business.

Another reason not to be too concerned about big businesses entering into social media marketing is how they do it.  Seth Godin described it best - "Big-thinking companies lose customers all the time because big-thinking companies isolate the decision makers from the outside world."  When big business attempts to use social media marketing, will they really listen? 

Mark Kvamme made an interesting comment on the marketing challenges big businesses face in an interview with Larry Weber in the Market Edge podcast.  Part of the message from their discussion - big companies don't realize that they no longer control the message. The "new" marketing person needs to be a steward of the conversation. First they need to be invited to the party instead of interrupting it.  Once invited, they can start a conversation, but they must understand that after the conversation is started, marketing doesn't control the message.

But big business has so many more customer relationships to leverage.

Who has real relationships, though? 

Many small business owners believe intuitively that they are able to have a deeper relationship with their customer. Social media is in perfect alignment with this competitive advantage that small businesses have over bigger ones.  The type of "information-sharing conversation" between salesperson and prospect that social media and inbound marketing initiates encourages future customers to buy-in to the solution by educating themselves at their own pace. Self-selected prospects are much easier to engage than prospects who are interrupted.

Small businesses can leverage the higher quality relationship that this inbound permission lead brings. Big businesses are still using interruption-based lead generation methods. They then typically use a convince and persuade sales strategy rather than a consultative strategy that is more likely to develop from permission-based inbound leads.

Small businesses live and die by their ability to solve customers' true challenges. As bigger businesses build big marketing and sales organizations, they lose track of customer focus and their ability to connect to a customer's true challenges. Small businesses have the skills and mindset to adapt to a world where buyers have much more ability to find the right solution on their own through search engines, blogs and social media.

Don't take anything for granted!

We certainly can't expect Fortune 500 companies or big business to do nothing.  Evidence of this can already be seen and according to eMarketer, $1.9 Billion will be spent on social media advertising in 2009 (compared to about $20 billion in overall web advertising this year).

Maybe the game of marketing has changed to a point where, as David Meerman Scott suggested at the Inbound Marketing Summit, we need a new way to measure marketing ROI.  His position - the ways we measure success today aren't necessarily the right ways to measure success of new marketing. For example, measure how many people were exposed to your ideas, downloaded something for free, shared that material, how many people are talking about your company - positively and negatively.

As a small business, you can decide at any time how to measure the effectiveness or success of your "new" marketing efforts. You intuitively know that building a strong reputation and a following online has much more lasting effects than a short term sale.  

You also know that measuring inbound marketing and social media based on its ROI, is an obvious and necessary thing to do. Most big businesses, believe it or not, don't know how they're going to measure their social media success, yet plan to spend significantly more money on it next year: 

• 87% are not measuring their ROI on social media marketing efforts.
• Yet, 67% report they will be increasing their social media advertising budget

At HubSpot, we'd wager that at some point, big businesses will figure out that it's not about throwing money, might and muscle at the web. And that it's about getting back to the very basics of business: helping your customers succeed and your industry progress.

Until then, small businesses have a big advantage. Don't wait to take advantage of it!

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Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web

The numbers this fall aren't good.

After a high above 14,000 last year, the Dow is now thrashing around well below 9,000. The U.S. government is spending over $700 billion to buy unprecedented stakes in the nation's largest banks. Many industries, including technology, are hemorrhaging jobs.

This post isn't about all that. It's about the silver lining -- the fact that, just as we saw eight years ago when the first Internet bubble burst, financial pressure is now forcing companies to make changes. And just like last time, these changes are laying the foundation for a new, more efficient period of Internet growth.

In 2001, when the last downturn began, businesses began shifting some of their marketing dollars to search engine advertising. It was more measurable and targeted than display advertising, so it was appealing to marketers with tight budgets.

 

 

As we enter a second Internet downturn, businesses are again seeking efficiency. They're shifting money out of expensive paid search advertising, and into optimization, content and social media that help them get found in organic search results.

These changes are laying the foundation for a new era of marketing on the web - the Inbound Marketing era.

 

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.

In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.

Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It's still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.

Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing on its head.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

 

 

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components:

(1) Content - Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.

(2) Search Engine Optimization - SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.

(3) Social Media - Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

 

 

Why Inbound Marketing Makes Sense in a Recession

As the economy slows down, companies are turning to Inbound Marketing because it is a more efficient way of allocating marketing resources than traditional, outbound marketing. As our CEO, Brian Halligan, puts it, when you're inbound marketing, the thickness of your brain matters a lot more than the thickness of your wallet.

There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing improves on the efficiency of traditional marketing:

(1) It Costs Less - Outbound marketing means spending money - either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it. A blog costs nothing to start. A Twitter account is free, too. Both can draw thousands of customers to your site.

(2) Better Targeting - Techniques like cold-calling, mass mail and email campaigns are notoriously poorly targeted. You're reaching out to individuals because of one or two attributes in a database. When you do Inbound Marketing, you only approach people who self-qualify themselves. They demonstrate an interest in your content, so they are likely to be interested in your product.

(3) It's an Investment, Not an Ongoing Expense - When you buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines, its value is gone as soon as you pay for it. In order to maintain a position at the top of Google's paid results, you have to keep paying. However, if you invest that money in quality content that ranks in Google's organic results, you'll be there until somebody displaces you.

The Roots of the Inbound Web

In the early days of the Internet, there was no mainstream marketing. There were lots of experiments but few business buyers and consumers.

In the mid-1990s, as the first Internet bubble grew, companies began to follow their customers online. Tools for independent publishing were weak, so companies' online presence mirrored their offline presence. They sprayed advertising across mass media sites and prayed a few potential customers would see it.

When the dot-com bubble popped in 2001, marketers began to reassess the effectiveness of the spray-and-pray approach. They saw that consumers and business buyers were starting their purchase process less on mass media sites, and more on search engines. They discovered that in many cases targeted search-engine advertising was far more effective than display advertising on large media sites.

As spending poured into search marketing, a new era of Internet growth began. In addition to changes in Internet marketing, this phase of growth -- Web 2.0 -- produced significant changes in the way we use the web. It shifted from a read-only platform to one where anybody could publish, connect with friends and share content.

Now, as we enter a new economic downturn, online marketers are using the tools of this new read-write web to become more efficient. They're using social media, they're publishing content and they're optimizing it. They're becoming Inbound Marketers.

The Inbound-Marketing Secret? Empowerment!

 

Eight years ago, when the dot-com bubble collapsed, the idea of a single man using great content, social media and search engine optimization to build a New Jersey liquor store into a $50-million-a-year business in the course of two years would have been absurd.

Yet that's exactly what Gary Vaynerchuk has done since he launched Wine Library TV in 2006.

This is the power of Inbound Marketing.

With the tools that have become mainstream over the last two to three years, the scale of any business can be unlimited. If you have a great product and the skills to communicate with your customers, you can compete with the biggest advertising budgets.

That is exciting, and for small businesses it's empowering.

 

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