April Fool’s Day is a Great Day in the World of Internet Marketing

Did you get fooled on April 1? What once was a day devoted to silly practical jokes (whoopee cushion anyone?) and sometimes mean-but-not-too-mean-pranks (“I eloped in Vegas last night mom and dad!”) is now getting big name brands involved. These almost believable spoofs are especially appreciated by us internet marketing consultants, because well, we’re geeks for this creative marketing stuff. Over the years, brands have had their fun with April Fool’s Day. Here are some all-time favorite marketing pranks:

How Email Lead Nurturing Helps Get You Customers 

You say to yourself I need more customers and ask, “How am I going to do that?”  You then realize that you have heard a lot about using your email and your website for marketing.  You call an Internet Marketing Consultant who gives you some good advice on what to start out with. You then set out to get some work done.  You set the website up, get some Calls-to-Action on it, you direct those to Landing Pages, have Free Offers to download or to sign up for and after your visitors give you their information you send them to a thank you page that you carefully set up.  That’s it.  You sit back in your chair with a smile on your face and enjoy this moment.  It feels good. No, it feels great.  You invested all that time and did all that hard work yourself and it’s starting to work. 

Remember These 5 ‘R’ Words and You'll Learn How to Blog Effectively in No Time!

I had a high school English teacher who taught me that one of the keys to writing, is to write what you know. For some reason, that has always stuck with me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved writing, and recognize that good writing is done by an author who knows what they’re talking about. I didn’t know then that I would be writing as an internet marketing consultant who would have to learn how to blog effectively. Heck, blogging was barely a thought when I was in high school (and I’m not that old) but this mantra can be used just as much for blogging as it can for high school English papers. In fact, I’m using that mantra as we speak; it just so happens I’m writing what I know about blogging for this very blog. Oh the irony!

A business that provides SEO services for small business is like having your own personal trainer for internet marketing.

Just like you need 5 basic food groups for a healthy, balanced diet, your SEO needs 5 basic components for a healthy internet marketing strategy. 

Do you think your website has what it takes to crush the competition when it comes to ranking in the search engines?

Let’s dive right in. So you’re looking through your website statistics thinking "my traffic sucks and I have less leads a month than I do toes on my left foot." You're probably thinking, “There has to be something wrong with what I’m doing,” well, there probably is. Generating leads doesn’t solely depend on your $20,000 showcase website that looks like the Taj Mahal, but rather how easy it is to navigate and how engaged it keeps your customers throughout their buying process. Yes, visual content may attract your customers at first with the “WOW” factor, but once they realize they’re stuck in a rat maze trying to find relevant content on your site that isn’t easily accessible, you can bet their little tails are being enticed by your worst enemy….”THE BACK BUTTON!"

If you can relate, read further…

5 Tips for Killer Calls-to-Action

What motivates you to do something? Do you take action based on how you feel? The way something looks? By doing what someone tells you to do? You may not know it, but subconsciously you make decisions big and small every day by answering those questions. Here’s a scenario for you, and just stay with me. As an internet marketing consultant I promise to relate it back to internet marketing. You’re going out to dinner and you get to choose the restaurant. You probably ask yourself, “what do I feel like eating?” When you look at the menu, and there’s a photo next to the day’s special, you might think “that looks good, I’ll have the special.” Or maybe your date is scanning the latest reviews on Yelp and says “oh, you should try the steak – it got great feedback!” What I’m getting at is that when you are making a decision, you are being influenced in different ways to take some kind of action.

How to  Increase Your Website Page Conversion 2,500% 

Here’s the scenario. You work really hard on your internet marketing to get traffic to your website. You may even be spending good money on PPC ads in Google or some other search engine. You desperately want people to buy something or call you or do something that will get them closer to being a paying customer. You put your phone number on the website and hope people call you. If you're doing a fairly normal job maybe you get 1 out of 500 visitors to actually call or email. Maybe you create a contact page and put a contact form on it and you get 1 out of 250 people to call or email. If you’re really doing well you get 1 out of 100 to convert or contact you and now you're up to the average conversion rate for websites over the last 20 years which is really close to what direct mail usually does, or at least used to do. So now what?

Online Press Releases are as Easy as 1, 2, 3

In college, I really liked writing press releases and I was good at them. But now, I love writing online press releases. I’m not sure if this is a quality of every Internet Marketing Consultant, but it’s true for me. They just make sense and they work. I graduated from college in 2005 with a degree in public relations. I could write press releases with the best of them. But what I wasn’t taught was anything about online press releases, because the online world as we knew it then didn’t use them, at least not the way we do now. Heck, Facebook was barely an idea yet. Sure, there were online news distribution sites, but online press releases are a relatively new concept, and a simple one at that. You find your news. You share your news on the web. Then you track it to see its value.

How your business can SQUEEZE ROI out of Social Media

Social Media is an important tool for growing your business but it’s a big subject and the hype around it sometimes is unbearable.  Figuring out how to take advantage of social media is confusing at best.  As an Internet Marketing Consultant I regularly run into business people who believe that it is probably important but don’t know where to start or even if they should.  The fact is that any well thought out internet marketing campaign that is going to have a decent ROI is going to be holistic and it will include some form of social media platform.  This won’t answer all of your questions but it will give you a good place to start.  We have clarified this subject for a lot of businesses and hopefully we will help you have a better picture to make more informed decisions in regards to your marketing investments.

My job as an Internet Marketing Consultant requires me to be constantly learning and staying up on trends so that I can provide the best information to help businesses get more clients. Sometimes, I think too hard about how to present the information so that you as a business professional can quickly and easily understand it. As is the case with the topic of link building. One thing I’m learning is to not reinvent the wheel, but instead utilize what I’m learning from others in the internet marketing industry. One trusted source that I use as a resource often is SEO Moz, a SEO software company, so I’ve decided to describe link building using their words: