I like the features offered in Blogspot (blogger.com) more and therefore I am discountinuing the blog here and post all updated content in my new blog at:
http://june-e-marketing.blogspot.com/index.html
Moreover, hosting my blog at blogspot gave me more exposure. I have just moved there for one day and the new traffic I got is much more than the traffic I got from hosting it here.
Be sure to visit my blog there!
Constantcontact.com is a easy to use web based software for your e-mail marketing list. It manages subscribers (both unsubscribe and new subscription), bounce-back, lists all wrong e-mail addresses, gives me open rate and also click thru rate for individual articles in my e-newsletter.
See below for an example of the summary statistics generated by constantcontact.com:
Below is an example of bounce-back details provided by constantcontact.com for a particular e-mail campaign:
Benefits of using Constantcontact.com:
Constantcontact.com is a very easy to use tool. I can easily divide my subscribers into different groups to send them different versions of my e-newsletter, based on their interest, customer status or geographics area. When new subscribers want to sign up for my e-newsletter, they will be prompt to subscribe to one of the available groups that fits their interest.
Constantcontact.com offers many different easy-to-use e-mail marketing template. You can further customize it to fit your needs. In my case, I have customized a template to abide by my company's branding requirements and to create an unique e-newsletter design.
Pricing of the tool is very reasonable. Be sure to check it out at www.constantcontact.com. I like the fact that I only have to pay a fixed monthly fee based on my list size. You are entitled for discounts if you prepay for 6 months or a year. You can send as many e-mail campaigns as you want with no limitation/ extra costs. For many other e-mail marketing services, they charge you based on the number of e-mail you sent. Although the cost per email will be cheaper if you are sending out more email, the later is harder for me to plan my annual e-mail marketing budget as the cost is not fixed but based on number of e-mail I sent.
Another good thing about using web based service is that you do not need to invest more into your server or IT equipment to accomodate the hardware/bandwidth requirements for sending out huge number of emails at a time. If you purchase an e-mail marketing software and installed it in-house, you might need to subscribe for additional bandwidth for your server, new computer/server and using a specific platform required. Lots of headache there. With a web based service, you do not have to worry about these.
Constantcontact.com is so easy to use and you don't need to be a seasoned html programmer to create a professional e-mail campaign. Of course, it will be beneficial to know a little bit of html. You would need to go to the html advanced editor to edit the following info in your e-mail campaign done in constantcontact.com.
1) If you want to change the "Subscribe now/Join us" heading, text and button, you would need to go to the advanced editor to change the codes there. In my case, I need to change it into French, so I need to go into the advanced editor to modify it.
Limitations in using Constantcontact.com:
1) There are 2 lines that cannot be changed, even in the advanced editor. It is a bit inconvenience for me as those lines are in English and I cannot change them into French in my French e-newsletter. I have contacted constantcontact.com and they have told me those 2 lines are hard coded in the software and cannot be altered.
These 2 lines are:
i) "To no longer receive our emails, click to unsubscribe." This line appears in the beginning of your e-mail.
ii) " This email was sent to myemail@email.com, by yourcompany@email.com." This line appears at the end of your email.
2) If your email campaign is targeted to non-business audiences, and the majority of which are using hotmail, gmail, yahoo type of accounts, constantcontact.com might not be an ideal tool to use. I have tried to send e-mail campaign to hotmail and gmail, the layout of my e-newsletter got altered, the graphics are not showing the way it suppose to be.
In my case it is not a big problem as my company is only dealing with business users and most of them do not use a web based e-mail address. However, if yours is a B2C business, you might want to double check if constantcontact.com is an ideal tool for you. Sign up for a free trial, create a test campaign and send to your hotmail/gmail/yahoo (any web based e-mail account) account, you will see if the software will alter your e-mail design layout.
Emarketing Blog Directory Listing of internet marketing blogs related to making money online and working from home. Find a blog, or submit yours.
My blog is also featured in this directory: http://emarketingblogs.com/listings/Internet-Marketing-Blogs-2.shtml
Or visit, Blogarama - The Blogs Directory
Or visit, Blog search directory
Or visit, Blog Catelogue
and look for June's E-marketing Blog under Internet -SEO/ SEO!
In my opinion, in order for you to get leads from your website, you need 2 things.
1) Traffic
2) Compelling content
Yes, you have done all you can to improve your web site's searchability, buying paid inclusion ad to generate tons of traffic to your website. If you do not have content, people will still leave your site in no time and you still have no new customer, no conversion.
You need compelling content to keep people on your site, to look for information, and hopefully they will request more info from you, sign up for your e-newsletter or to make a purchase on your e-commerce site.
Avoid wasting the traffic generated, before doing SEO or paid inclusion and improving your site's organic searchability, you should better your site content first.
Put aside e-commerce here (I will talk about it in another post), by saying compelling content, I mean the followings:
1) professional attractive web layout
- clean and consistent layout, not too busy, easy to read
- attractive graphics
- easy navigation
- simple and easy to use user interface
- good site ergonomics
2) Create positive client experience - with multimedia, full of useful features, easy to use
3) Relevant content - Imagine yourself go to a website after clicking on a sponsor link or a result on SERP but found no relevant content when you get there, will you leave the site immediately?
4) Just-enough information - short and precise. Depends on the industry and products (especially for expensive business products which usually requires longer decision process), sometimes too much details on the website is no good. People will be overwhelm by the info and get frustrated as they cannot comprehend. Provide just-enough information to generate interest in your products and to encourage people to contact you for more information. (However, for e-commerce site, you need to put enough info there so people knows the product enough to be confident to purchase from you.)
5) Quick loading - If your site takes forever to load, who has the patience to wait and browse?
Using web analytics tool, like Webtrend (I use Webtrend before and now using SurfStatLive), keep track of on average, how many pages a visitor visits (Total # of page viewed/ Total # of visits). You can know how "sticky" your site is and can make plan to improve your site (or keep on doing what is working).
Yes, always need to improve the stickiness of your page. You want your visitors to stay on your page longer to look for info and at the end to convert them into a customer.
I would say, organic ranking (result ranked by search engine itself) and paid inclusion are both very important. They compliment each other to give you the maximum traffic you can get for your website.
Statistically, 70% of the web surfers would click on an organic search result on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and 30 % would click on a paid advertisement/ sponsored link. My company's web traffic report shows similar statistics.
Try all ways you can to improve your organic searchability. After that, do a good research on keywords and then launch a paid inclusion campaign. Afterall, you just need to pay for all the clicks you get. You can also limit the number of clicks you want for a specified period. Trust me, the cost per lead from search engine marketing (SEM) is much cheaper than other traditional marketing methods. Moreover, SEM gives me much more qualified leads - in this case, web users search for us and are interested in our products. I don't need to go out to introduce my company and products, they come and knock on my door themselves. Which one do you think is better?
Of course, to succeed, you need to use good keywords and compelling Ads and site/page descriptions. So web surfers would think your site is relevant to their search and click on your link for more information.
First of all, I would go online and identify a few main competitors for my company (other than the ones I already know). I would type in some keywords, and see who is ranking high in different search engines and also serving the area my company has business in.
Then, I will use the following tools to keep track of what my main competitors are doing:
1) Alexa.com
- A free and very easy to use site to track the traffic of competitors' website. Are they doing better or worse? If they are doing better, try to investigate why. What they have done and you didn't or what you have done wrong.
2) Watchthatpage.com
- I use this to monitor any updates on my competitors' website. Some people would use it to monitor price drop or increase in their competitors' sites. It is a free, very easy to use automated tool. Since changes on my competitors' sites are not frequent, I have scheduled the tool to send changes/updates to my email address once every Thursday. A very useful tool!
3) Archive.org
- This free site brings you back to the older version of a website, before it is updated. You type in the website address and then choose from any archive date they have there to view the old site. Very useful if you want to check what your competitors have on their sites a few weeks ago, before their recent updates.
Use this tool to select the perfect keywords for your website:
http://www.goodkeywords.com/
Also, using the Google keyword tools can be a good starting point too:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Yahoo keyword tool will be a very useful tool also:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
When you are selecting your keywords, remember:
- Don’t use Jargon, use the keywords the end users use to find your site
- Open to new keyword opportunities
- Monitor your keyword performance and get rid of the under performed keyword choices
- Use plurals instead of singular keywords (if you need to pick one)
For me, I will also go to my competitor's web site and see
what keywords they are using also.
Do you know? We are currently in the third generation of the search engine marketing era:
First generation: based on text on the page, including meta-tag and meta-description
Second generation: based on link analysis, e.g. reciprocal linkage
Third generation: vertical and personalize
What does the third generation means?
Vertical search: It is a specialized search engine that mines data for one narrow niche of the market place. (it is more focus and even more efficient than PPC <pay per click> advertising) A good example would be http://www.kayak.com/
Personalize: My Web in Google. Google reshapes your search results based on the followings:
- What you personally do or visit?
- What your friends do or visit?
- What people in a particular group, for example, live in the same country, enjoy the same sport do or visit?
- Content in your email.
Advantage of third generation:
- focus on key vertical for a specific industry
- have great content
- Especially great title and descriptions
Search marketing is going everywhere, anywhere you can type. In the future, maybe you can use it from your phone, PDA etc.
MSN is working very aggressively for search marketing. It is going after demographics, day parting (e.g. you only want clicks during the certain time of the day, only night or only day). When you pay for MSN adCenter, they will give you the click in the population you want. (as accurately as the data users entered in the MSN passport).
For the purpose of my company, at this point, I don't see the uses of the third generation search engine. First of all, our industry is very specific and we do not have a vertical search engine. For the personalize part, I think it is more applicable to B2C. Although I cannot use them for my company, I think the third generation search engine era is very powerful, gives online marketers lots of information and they will be able to target a selected group of people!
Don't know if you guys have heard of this. Anyhow, I have landing pages done for my company website. I do not do it myself, but hired an agency from France to assist me in doing it. They have told me creating the landing pages can help improving your website searchability - more pages to be indexed and crawled by the search engines.
Anyhow, when I search on the web, landing pages actually means something else. It is the page people land on to when they click your online advertisement. I have this kind of landing pages for my company too, for a ad banner campaign targeting to a specific vertical.. I need to tailor the landing page to catch the attention of this segment and hopefully they will go to our website, looking for more info and to convert them into a customer at the end.
To avoid confusion, let's refer the landing pages the French company did for me as "keyword pages". I want to share this first in my blog as I think maybe not too many people know about this? Well.. I don't really know, but recently I went to a Search Engine Expo and they didn't talk anything about keyword pages.
It does improve the ranking of the website in search engine and not something an e-marketer should ignore. As all of you might know, it is very hard to predict what will work and what will not work to improve the organic searchability in search engines. We need to do all we know and hopefully one or a few of the methods will work.
The keyword pages I have is:
1) I have divided my company's pages into different categories... for example I have 4 categories, let's say Racing cars, Truck, Sedan and Minivan, then identify all of the most important keywords in each category.
2) Utilize all of the keywords identified to create 3 different blocks of text for each category. These text will be used as content for the keywords pages.
3) Now, we need to build the keyword pages. For example, in the racing car category, you have 6 pages (1 main page and 5 different racing cars). Then you will use paragraph A for racing car category in Page 1 and Page 4, paragraph B for Page 2 and 5 and so forth. Use corresponding picture for corresponding topic in each of the pages. Each of these keyword pages will have hyperlink for all other available keyword pages.
4) Now select 4 correponding keywords (1 per category) in your home page and make these words an invisible anchor link to the main keyword page in each category. Usually a hyperlink is underline and in different colour on a website. What I mean by invisible link is, those anchor links are in the same colour as the rest of the text in the page and is not underlined.
5) Index all these keyword pages in the search engines and upload all pages in your website FTP server.
You should see improvement of your organic searchability in a month or two.
Have been working as an e-marketing professional for a few years now, and seriously I feel so bad about myself of not using blogs and knowing so little about blogs. (I need to keep up on all emerging technology to stay at the top!.. oh well.. at least.. trying...)
That's why I decided to start my own blog. To use this technology and hopefully can exchange ideas with other e-marketing professionals and anyone who is interested in knowing more about internet marketing.
I like internet marketing as it is the type of marketing you can see and measure the results almost instantly after you launch your campaign. You can also change your campaign anytime according to the results. Yes, I like to see result and improve campaign based on data collected. I am a strong believer in data driven marketing. Other traditional marketing channel won't allow you to do this. Direct mailer is much more costly and it is much harder and takes much longer to plan and to see the results.
Anyway, I am going to share the stuff I know about internet marketing in my blog. Please feel free to share your knowledge and exchange ideas here. From there, all of us can learn more about e-marketing and benefit from there.
I want to know more about RSS feed, podcasting, blogs and their applications in a B2B business environment. I am currently doing some research online and see which of these new technologies can be applied to my company's website/ marketing mix, to drive more traffic and increase searchability. Please kindly share your thoughts on these technology here! :)
In return, I will share all I know about e-marketing... about paid inclusion (like Google AdWord), landing pages, reciprocal linkages, search engine friendly design, site map and e-mail marketing etc. I might not be very details in the beginning, but just want to share my experience and findings first to get the discussions started.
I am very excited to have this blog. Hopefully I will get new comments and ideas from different people. Knowledge sharing helps all of us to learn more about this relatively new and exciting field of marketing.
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