E-Class #46: How to Take Internet Marketing to the Next Level

Checkpoint:

• You now know what a host beneficiary relationship is, and have created a list of the potential partnership opportunities that exist for your business.
• You have drafted a host beneficiary proposal letter, and are planning to approach your top three businesses and request a partnership.

Your Internet marketing efforts will grow as you become comfortable with this new medium, and build on your successes.

The thing is, a lot of online marketing strategies require some trial and error. You won’t know what keywords are most effective until you test a few out.

Plus, it takes time for things like search engine optimization and ranking strategies to take shape. When your website is new, it takes time to build strong daily traffic. Things seem to be happening at a fast pace, but your marketing strategies won’t make magic happen overnight.

In this E-Class I’m going to go over how to test and measure your online marketing efforts, since you need to look at different indicators. I’m also going to go over social media, and how you can include it in your online marketing.

In this E-Class we will cover:

• How to test and measure your online marketing efforts
• Eight metrics to track and measure
• How to improve your linking strategy
• How to start marketing using social media

Testing, measuring and evaluating your online presence can be challenging.

As with any element of your marketing campaign, you will need to track your results and measure them against your investment. Otherwise, how will you know if your online marketing is successful?

Before you can start to test, measure and evaluate your online marketing efforts, you have to be clear what your objectives are. Sometimes these objectives will be similar to your traditional marketing strategies, but often

Here are some potential objectives:

• Increase visitor traffic (hits) to your website.
• Build your email contact database.
• Increase your search engine ranking.
• Convert visitors to leads.
• Generate leads for your business.
• Generate sales for your business.
• Drive traffic to a specific page.

Now, to measure your website presence, there are some basic questions you need to be asking yourself about your website:

• Who are your visitors?
• Where do they come from?
• What pages do they look at?
• On what page do they leave the site?

Due to the popularity in online marketing and the importance of having a strong web presence, companies have demanded more sophisticated tracking tools and metrics for their online activities. It can be very difficult to not only know what to measure, but also HOW to measure.

Thankfully, It is easier than ever to get the information you need with the many types of software and services available, including Google Analytics, which are free and relatively accurate.

Here are the eight metrics you need to be tracking to evaluate your online campaigns:

The following are the key measurables to watch for when testing and measuring your internet marketing efforts:

Conversions

How many leads has your online presence generated, and of those leads, how many were turned into sales? Ultimately, your campaign needs to have a positive impact on your business.

Regardless of the specific purpose of the campaign – from lead generation and service sign-up, to blog entries – you need to know how many customers are taking the desired action in response to your efforts. Your tracking tool will be able to provide you with this information

Spend

If you are not making a profit – or at least breaking even – from your internet marketing efforts, then you need to change your strategy. Redistribute your financial resources and reconsider your motives and objectives for your online campaign.

An easy way to do this analysis is to divide your total spend by conversions. This could also be broken down by product. You could also use tracking tool and view reports on the ‘per visit value of every click,’ from every type of source. Your sources can include organic/search engine referrals, direct visit (i.e. person typed your web address into their address bar), or email/newsletter.

Attention

You need to keep a close eye on how much attention you are getting on your website. One of the best ways to analyze this would be to compare unique visitors to page views per visit to time on site. How many people are visiting, how many pages they are viewing, what pages they are viewing, and how much time they are spending on the site.

A unique visitor is any one person who visits the website in a given amount of time. For example, if Evelyn visits her online banking website daily for an entire month, over that one month period, she is considered to be one unique visitor (not 30 visitors).

You may also want to incorporate referring source as well – the places online that refer customers to your website. You’ll be able to determine what referring sources offer the ‘best’ visitors.

Top Referrals

Know who is doing the best job of referring clients to your website – and note how they are doing this. Is it the prominence of the link? Positioning? Reputation of the referring company?

Understanding where the most of your visitors are coming from will allow you focus on those types of sources when you increase your referral sites. They also allow you to gain a better understanding of your online market – and target audience.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the number of people who visit the homepage of your website, but do not visit other pages. If you have a high bounce rate, you either have all the necessary information on your homepage, or you are not giving your customers a reason to click further.

In Google Analytics, view the ‘content’ or ‘pages’ report and view the column stating bounce rate.

Errors

It is very important to track the errors that visitors receive while trying to access or view your website. For example, if someone links to your website, but makes a spelling error in typing the link, your users will see an error page in their browser, and will not ultimately make it to your website.

You can also receive reports on errors that customer’s make when trying to type in your website address in their browser. You may wish to buy the domains with common spelling mistakes, and link those addresses to you true homepage. This will increase overall traffic and potential conversions.

Onsite Search Terms

If you have a ‘search website’ function on your website, it is useful to monitor which terms users are most frequently searching. This can provide valuable insight into the user friendliness of your site and your website’s navigation system.

This information will be included in the traffic reporting tool.

Bailout Rates

If you provide users with the option to purchase something on your website (i.e. shopping cart), then you can track where along the purchasing process people decided not to go through with the sale.

This could be at the first step of receiving the order summary and total, or further when stating shipping options. By obtaining this information, a company can reorganize or revamp their website to make the sales process more fluid and possibly encourage more purchases.

I want to show you two more online marketing strategies that will drive traffic, sales and interest in your business.

1. Linking strategies will drive traffic to your site by connecting it to other relevant sites using hyperlinks.

Linking is a way to drive traffic to your website, as well as to improve your search engine ranking. The number of people who provide links to your website on their website determines your link popularity, which gets factored into your search engine ranking. The higher quality and quantity the links (i.e., links from reputable pages), the higher your ranking. Here are some strategies for improving links.

1. Make sure your site is listed in all key directories.

As I mentioned in earlier E-Classes, the more directories you’re listed in, the better. Important directories that I haven’t mentioned include the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com) Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) and About (www.about.com).

Follow the instruction for submission, and be patient. You may have to wait a while to move from the bottom of the queue, but some directories offer faster service for additional costs.

2. Let trade organizations, specialized directories, industry associations, and professional associations know about your site.

Submit your site to these groups, with a short description. If you belong to any trade or professional association, they often list their members on the webpage. Think of all the professional sites or organizations out there related to your business, and just ask for a link. You may have to pay a small amount for it, but it may help to increase your search engine ranking.

3. Request links in exchange for links.
4. Request Reciprocal Links. Find websites in your general niche and request a reciprocal link to your site (especially to your free service, if you offer one, see #24 below). Develop an out-of-the way page where you put links to other sites — so you don’t send people out the back door as fast as you bring them in the front door. Your best results will be from sites that generate a similar amount of traffic as your own site. High-traffic site webmasters are too busy to answer your requests for a link and don’t have anything to gain. Look for smaller sites that may have linking pages.

Warning: Only link to complementary sites, no matter how often you are bombarded with requests to exchange links with a mortgage site that has nothing to do with your teddy bear store. One way Google determines what your site is about is who you link to and who links to you. It’s not just links, but quality links you seek. Reciprocal linking as hard, tedious work, but it doesn’t cost you a dime out of pocket! Keep working at this continuously, a little bit at a time. Patience and persistence will get you some good links, so keep at it.

4. Publish free articles, and link back to your site.

When you write articles on topics related to your business, you can distribute them to editors of ezines, online newsletters and websites. You’ll usually receive credit for your article, as well as a hyperlink to your website. This is an effective way to increase the number of reputable or quality links to your site. EzineArticles.com is one of the most popular sites, and they allow you to create free accounts.

2. Social media strategies create communities around your business, and create casual opportunities to interact with your customers.

Social media is exploding as a form of online marketing, and the marketing world is buzzing with strategies for tapping into and profiting from the surge. Basically, social media works to promote your website by directing traffic, producing links, and generating awareness through the spiderweb of personal and professional networks. Basically, there are three types of social media:

1. Blogs
2. Social networking sites
3. Social bookmarking sites

1. Blogs promote your intellectual capital and provide links to your site.

I mentioned this in the last E-Class, but thought it was worth discussing again. Business blogs can be created through any hosting service, and connected to your own website. You can also create a blog on your own website.

Focus on creating interesting, relevant content, and try to avoid talking about your product or service all the time. If your content is genuine and you post regularly, people will link to it and drive traffic to your site as well as boost your search engine ranking.

2. Social networking sites drive awareness and provide likes to your site.

Popular social networking communities include Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com).

Facebook allows businesses to create their own pages, and then individuals with profiles can then become “fans.” Content you post to your business’ Facebook page will appear in all your fans news feeds, and they’ll be able to receive instant updates.

Twitter is a fairly simple network that connects people, and allows you to post and update your status. You can follow others status updates, and they can follow yours. Your “ranking” or popularity is determined based on the number of people who “follow” your “tweets” and the number of people you follow. Businesses are getting creative with how they use the service. A bakery in the UK created a device that posts an announcement on Twitter each time a fresh batch of bread comes out of the oven.

As with blogs, social networking is not about promoting your business every chance you get. It’s about being part of a genuine community, so you need to listen and participate in an honest way that contributes to everyone who is a part of it. If you hog the conversation, it will hurt your reputation.

3. Social bookmarking will increase awareness of your site.

This sounds like a simple strategy, but it’s becoming a popular way for people to share pages that they find interesting or useful.

Social bookmarking services like Digg and Delicious serve as an online location for you to keep and organize your bookmarks. They also allow you to browse through other’s profiles to find pages by keyword, or randomly.

You can ask visitors to bookmark your site using an easy widget called AddThis – www.addthis.com – which guides visitors through the process of adding your site through their bookmark service of choice. If your content is interesting and relevant enough for viewers to bookmark it, you can potentially generate hundreds of new hits for your website.

Remember that the Internet is an evolving tool, and so successful internet marketing requires a strategy that continually evolves.

You won’t learn all there is to know about successfully marketing your business online in two E-Classes, and I haven’t tried to show you. Once you have the basics down, it’s up to you figure out what makes sense for your business as a next step. Some businesses enjoy huge success with viral marketing, while others choose to nurture and develop their social media involvement.

Next on deck is a series of E-Classes that focus on your product and service margins. The next one will focus on your pricing strategy – when was the last time you updated yours?

Until next time!