Everybody has a different approach to almost everything they do in life and that includes their own personal marketing strategy. With so many different DNA’s and personalities floating around in the web it is nice to see the different approaches that business owners and entrepreneurs take to execute their online marketing efforts.

What type of personality does your internet marketing have?

Aggressive Internet Marketing Personality:
Do you spend almost every waking and free minute you have pumping out content and information surrounding your business? Being aggressive is not a bad marketing personality to have you just have to be careful to not upset your target audience or community. It is common nature to be an aggressive business and promoting your brand but there is a thin line between being too aggressive and a nuisance. When using the social media tools do you almost always only promote your own products and services? Do you ever take the time to use them for what they were designed for and push out any great content you find surrounding your industry?

Casual Internet Marketing Personality:
Is your internet marketing very laid back? Little bit of communication here and there but somehow it seems to work for you? Nothing wrong with that either. We can’t all be work horses and grind the skin down to our bones. Updating your Twitter account once per/week is fine if it works for you. If it doesn’t than maybe the heat on the fire needs to be turned up a bit so things work out how they are supposed to. Sometimes certain niches respond differently to different frequencies of communication. It really depends on how much knowledge you have about your industry and what they like to see come from different business and leaders in their space.

Edgy Internet Marketing Personality:
Does your marketing personality push the envelope on the seams of society? Do you like to cause a stir whether it is good or bad? This could either work 2 ways from what I have seen. Either you force this type of approach to your marketing and it really isn’t in you and it shows in your work or you poses this trait naturally and it works like a charm because no matter how much you push buttons your audience, colleagues and competitors still respect the heck out of you. Edgy marketing that might offend some and intrigue others could work great and really increase your revenues and overall branding efforts but if execute improperly it could backfire on your business quite ferociously.

Calculated Internet Marketing Personality:
Do you have a very analytical personality and mindset? Taking a calculated approach to your marketing efforts could pan out very well in the ROI department. Some companies really don’t give a hoot about branding and social communication. They tend to focus on accounting ledgers and what goes out and what comes back in which still is a very important part of any marketing campaign. It is always great to try and determine your return on investment before you approach the marketing space but it can’t always be done. If you do apply this type of personality to your marketing be careful you don’t over calculate your marketing to the point where nobody really knows who you are and you always have to market your business to acquire new business rather than building a little brand recognition resulting in a steady flow of inbound leads and sales.

There is no right or wrong path when it comes to deciding on an personality to apply to your internet marketing efforts. The best approach is the one that comes naturally to you. If you hold certain traits and characteristics as a person apply those to your online marketing or branding efforts. Don’t make your internet marketing campaign a chore. Marketing and branding your business should be exciting and fun and if you approach it that way you could find yourself growing your business very nicely while burning the image of your brand in your audiences mind.

A personality is what gives a business their stamp in front of their audience. A business having some sort of personality is much better than a business having absolutely no personality whatsoever. For some businesses that is how people remember you by. Give your audience something to snack on when conducting any of your internet

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If you are somewhat new to the SEO world and you have been given the task of finding an SEO services company to hire to help your business might leave you with some investigative work to do. There are many, many SEO companies out there claiming they are the best and if you are trying to isolate the right SEO services company to partner with there are some things you should know before you make your final decision.

Don’t Base Your Entire Decision On Price

This theory can go in both directions. With many things in life if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Do you really think you are going to effectively market your business and beat out your competition on $49.95 per/month? Chances are no. This doesn’t mean that you have to go and spend $2,000 per/month either. Be realistic on what it takes to market a business online. There are distribution costs associated with some efforts, time to write articles and press releases along with the time and energy to constantly put together an ongoing SEO strategy that is going to help you grow
your business online the right way.

Research The SEO Services Company

Do a little bit of research on the companies you are thinking about working with. Find out everything about them. Search their company names online and see what you come up with. Take a look and see if other companies have done any write ups on them or what type of information is lurking in the search results for their company name. If there is nothing in the search results scratch them off your list.

Don’t Make Your Decision on Whether the SEO Website Ranks

If you search for “SEO” and you don’t see them on page 1 don’t rule them out as a company just yet. There are only ten parking spaces on the first page of Google and they can’t fit thousands of companies into this space. You have some SEO companies that have had their websites for ten plus years so it will be difficult to move them out of the way in the search results. Plus keep in mind that in our industry “most” SEO companies know exactly what they are doing so we have to compete against an industry that practices what they preach.

How Many Employees Does the SEO Services Company Have?

Think about it for a minute, if they have 40 or 50 employees chances are they have many business processes in place along with policies and protocols that are iron clad. Chances are you will hear “Sorry that is just policy” at some point during your SEO campaign. If you go with a firm that has 10 or 15 people you might have a bit more flexibility with pricing and special requests that the large firms won’t even budge on. I’m not saying every large company that offers SEO is bad to work with but you have to watch out for everything out there.

Not Every Hosting Company and Web Designer Knows SEO

Just because your hosting company or web designer claims they know how to do SEO, that doesn’t mean that they actually do. A hosting company’s primary focus was to host websites and along the way they realized that if they open an SEO division they can become slightly more profitable. Same goes with web designers and developers. Just because the recession came along and they slapped up an SEO page on their website does not mean they are trained to execute it properly.

Make Sure the SEO Services Company Speaks English

Would you really want someone who barley speaks English working on the marketing for your company? Since search engine optimization is an effort that really encompasses the art of language you need someone that completely 100% understand the language and also things like industry slang that could be a very important keyword in your vertical or niche. Someone doing search engine optimization on the other side of the world that barley speaks English is not going to get that part of the task right and you will not be running at full steam when the job is done – that is not an opinion that is reality.

Take the time to really analyze the SEO company you are going to work with before you do so you can avoid any shotty work or getting burned along the way.

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Websites do not typically just rank for the sake of ranking, especially if they are a new website in the search space. The Bing Webmaster blog gives some sound pieces of advice to keep your website running like a well oiled machine and keep you rankings climbing.

“Check to see if your site employs a robots.txt file. If so, confirm that the directives block only what you want blocked. If one or more sets of custom directives exist for specific bots, be sure they include all necessary directives from the generic set of directives. Then be sure the file has been validated. Also, check for and review the validity of any REP commands in webpage tags and in HTTP Headers.” Sometimes a website might have robots.txt file blocking the entire website leaving it rather difficult to be found in organic search.

“Whereas a robots.txt tells search bots what not to crawl, a Sitemap conversely identifies the most important content on your site for indexing. A well-done Sitemap can help your site be crawled more effectively, and that can only help in optimizing your search ranking for indexed content.”

Every website should have a sitemap. A sitemap is the architecture to your website that allows the search engines to understand its structure. It is also important because it allows the search engines to index your information much quicker because they are able to read it and crawl it. A sitemap lets the search spiders know that it is time to re-index a website because they have just added new material to it.

An important SEO factor for measuring the value of websites by search engines is page load time. Servers that host sites with huge pages (such as those with too much high-resolution image content), too little bandwidth for their regular traffic, always running near or at maximum capacity, are intermittently unavailable, or are physically located so far away from their target market that their performance is always hampered by too many time-consuming router hops, can suffer ranking consequences due to these problems.

Page load time is a new factor that has become an influence on search rankings. Make sure to keep your website clean and leave your scripts and widgets to a minimum in order to keep things moving fast.

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There are two different outcomes that many websites or businesses strive for when they market themselves online but which is more important: achieving higher search engine rankings or really building out your business brand in the online space? Both are important and crucial for success online but which do you prefer?

Since the spawn of the search engines many people’s mindset has always been to be on page 1. Everything they did online revolved around being on page 1 and we grew with the search engines thinking that the only way a website can succeed is to have high search rankings for their targeted keywords. As a website owner it is important to understand that things have changed, they are changing and they will change even more so it is important to be diverse. For some reason most people are in the mindset of approaching the search engine ranking ranking game with a short term marketing mindset (example: need high rankings by next week). Why is that? Do you plan on keeping your business around for just a short while? Building a brand around your business online will not only help your rankings but it helps you sustain your business well into the future. What is going to happen to your business if you spend all your time simply focused on rankings and all of a sudden Google makes a change where your rankings dip? If you have been simultaneously building your brand online you can weather that storm and keep bringing in new business but if you have been centered on just rankings than you could find yourself knee deep in mud with nowhere to go.

Search engine rankings and brand building should go hand in hand when venturing into the online marketing space. It doesn’t matter what your business is building a brand has become even more important than ever before. Things like social media and the recent economic decline have caused businesses to really strengthen their online image. Purchasing behavior has changed and if you have a hard time acknowledging that you might find your business drying up quickly. Don’t spend all your time on short term efforts because the long term marketing and branding efforts are just as important.

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Social media for business is still a process that is molding and changing but no doubt about it every single business needs a social media presence regardless of what they do. But has social media slowly changed into a business beast? Of course many businesses are there to build their business but, when is too much business going to hurt your brand in the social communities?

Social media developed and spawned in order to allow people to be able to communicate online with other like minded people but somewhere along the way a light bulb went off over the heads and business minded people and entrepreneurs across the globe. Facebook did it right when they invoked very strict rules in place surrounding the idea of people trying to launch business accounts around a personal profile. Facebook realized that there is an importance of offering a business model to a social networking tool. It just has to be done tastefully and it has to be done right so they launched a separate section for businesses to market themselves. If Facebook allowed for businesses to launch personal profiles, their website would have deteriorated very quickly and the quality of facebook would not have been preserved for the long term.

Social media and business go hand in hand but it is important for businesses to realize that there is an approach that is highly appreciated and there are many approaches that are very frowned upon. A Twitter feed should not be used solely for the sake of throwing out your products every day in the social stream. There is a reason why they call it a “community” and it has to be approached like a community. Pretend you are at a dinner party and you speak with someone to let them know what you do for work, soon thereafter you might speak about something else occurring in your industry or in general. This is very similar to how a business should approach the online communities. You want to let people know you are a business and you have products or services but you also want to let them know that you are there to participate in whatever the goal of that technology might be.

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Social media is sort of like a cake if you think about it. Every month you add new layers on top of new layers really strengthen your image and your brand. What kind of efforts do you like to include in your daily correspondence with your community?

Let’s take a look at some of the online communication efforts that should be happening that might not be right now.

Presentation Sharing: Presentation sharing is one of those things that people don’t pay much attention to but really should. Sites like Scribd.com and DocStoc.com are amazing places to post older presentations you might have sitting around. With the ability to leave links behind not only can you build up your community with the social aspect but the ability to generate some nice links and actually deliver targeted traffic to your website is really there.

Photo Sharing: Are you a business that does many social benefits, functions or fundraisers and you have lots of great photos sitting around? If you do than you should get them out off the hard drive they are sitting on get them into sites like Flickr.com where you can start applying those photos to a more social effort. Maybe you have a business that has machinery or products where you can take photos? For example a car dealership can keep a running log of photos of the showroom, service bays and employees and use those photos in a variety of the photo sharing websites.

Free Giveaways: This one might sound strange to you but if you are a business that has the ability to give something away do it. Post the message on your social profiles along with the variety of websites that offer freebies and free products and watch your community build very quickly. Do this step the right way and you could also generate a great deal of links to your website from other bloggers writing about your freebie.

Everyone seems to flock towards the Facebook and Twitter pages for all their social media marketing efforts but these above efforts are ones that not everyone always thinks about using. Incorporate them into your social efforts and watch your search engine optimization really strengthen over time.

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Search engine optimization is important for all types of websites including ecommerce platforms.

Things can get tricky for e-commerce websites because some have many products. It can become quite an immense task to have to optimize thousands of merchandise pages but if you want to be successful online you are going to have to take the time and dive into SEO at some point.

It is no surprise that good quality unique content is an important step to the process of optimizing a website. Often times on an e-commerce website you could have product categories where the only difference between ten or fifteen products could be simply the color. It might be easy to write one product description and simply change out the text for the color portion of the write up but you are going to want to do more than just that. You will really need to take the time and focus on creating unique product descriptions even if the products are close in nature.

What info should I include on the product pages?

Generally you need to put yourself in the shoes of your audience when trying to answer this question. If you wanted to find something very specific on this product you might flip it over and look at the serial number or possibly the model number? You want to include all relevant information regarding that specific product in the body of the page in between the text somewhere and also in the meta information. Take as much data and information that you can find surrounding the product including manufacturer names and descriptions and incorporate them into the elements of that specific product page. Make sure to not copy the descriptions word for word but rather try and put them into your own words. Over time you will see a nice increase in steady traffic that might be using those elements to search with.

What about the URL’s?

The problem with many ecommerce websites is that they are database driven and you almost always have to have some string of characters in the URL that are unavoidable. If your site structure uses page ID’s you should be able to replace the page ID’s with text in the URL structure. Use friendly URL structures that incorporate some of your keywords into the structure. You don’t want to leave it as a nasty string of characters because that does not do anybody any good.

Should I use product reviews?

If you are absolutely certain that the majority of your product reviews will most likely be positive ones than yes. Product reviews are a great way to not only strengthen the overall SEO capabilities you are trying to achieve but also the user experience. Good solid product reviews can often time lead into an increase in overall product sales.

How many drop downs should there be to find a product?

Your web traffic should never have to do more than two clicks to get to any product. The more difficult it is for that user to find your product the longer it will take for sales to start occurring. You want that flow of traffic to be as quick as possible. Right from the home page all web traffic should be able to make it to almost any product you have on your website pretty quickly. Make it effort less and painless for products to be seen.

Should I optimize the images as well?

A typical ecommerce website is going to have a great deal of images which creates an opportunity for other visitors to make their way into your website through an image search.

Sometimes someone might want to find an image of a certain product before they purchase and search for it using one of the image search engines. If your image pops up that web visitor might just turn into a web customer so it is important to label exactly what the image is. If it is a stroller name the image the name of the stroller, manufacturer and even model number can be there if you want to be aggressive.

Optimizing an ecommerce site brings on a few more elements that say a traditional informative website for a business. There are many elements of the site that traffic will use and it is important to have all those elements optimized 100% so your web traffic understands exactly how to navigate through your website.

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Are you sitting on a pile of email addresses at your company or business that are being severely underutilized? Chances are you are not alone. Email marketing is one of the oldest digital forms of communication and promotion and it is still to this day one of the most powerful. Infusionsoft has created a very easy to use hassle free way to promote whatever you want through a variety of powerful email campaigns funneled down through a very powerful CRM dashboard.

Infusionsoft also acts as a very powerful CRM system that allows you to automatically keep track of all your email contacts in one location. You don’t have to fiddle with other websites and hope that all your efforts sync up correctly. Infusionsoft also has a very friendly and easy to use email builder system that utilizes a drag and drop type of technology that allows even a novice to produce a beautiful and professional looking html email. Keeping in touch with all your contacts on a regular basis is very important in order to grow your business.

Here is a video about the Infusionsoft CRM and Email Marketing software product:

Infusionsoft prides itself on 3 distinct business building features:

Email Marketing: Create professional and inspiring email marketing designs to send out to all your professional contacts. No more fiddling around with difficult to use email builders that require too much education on how to use them properly. Infusionsoft’s drag and drop technology is some of the easiest to use in the industry.

Integrated CRM: Have a convenient and powerful dashboard to control and monitor all your prospects, leads and customers so you know exactly what you are working with and when you should be contacting them is crucial. Keeping track of your contacts and leads is extremely important for future growth so you don’t find yourself missing out on your are supposed to contact. As things get busier and busier you will need to have somewhere safe to keep track of everything.

Automation: Infusionsoft can follow up with your contacts for you so you don’t have to think about it too much. Let’s face it our days are getting busier and busier and automation is now a part of life. Some steps will just have to be automated so they do not slip through the cracks. Think of it like a virtual sales team that never stops working.

There is a great deal of distraction in almost every niche or business space so creating new touch points in your circle of contacts is needed so you can stay on their radar. In today’s marketplace a consistent schedule of contact attempts is very important and as your list grows you will need a tool that can help you not only manage that list but also maximize all of its opportunities and potentials.

Click here to download the free email marketing 2.0 report from Infusionsoft!

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Google is not dumb by any means, but they really can’t complain about the SEO industry because they single handedly have shaped the entire search industry.

Unethical practices are going to spring up anywhere there is a chance to make some money and you have to take the good with the bad. Google has made lots of money for themselves but in the process they have spawned and industry with no regulation and no benchmarks leaving things wide open for you know…the bad people.

Google Pagerank: If you ask me Google pagerank was one of the biggest culprits to the overall madness of online spam. Many website owners got so wrapped up over the notion of increasing that little number that they lost track of the importance of being online. Sure at one point you could sit there and perform certain strategies that would allow that number to climb but did those efforts really bring in business or traffic? If your pagerank grew naturally that was one thing but as soon as someone forced that number to grow that is when ethics went out the window and loop holes wrere pounced on.

Here is a quote from Alan Bleiweiss from an article he wrote on the Search Engine Journal:

“Every single new method that Google uses to determine ranking has, ultimately been compromised and manipulated. It’s a never ending cycle that won’t end just by shifting to outbound links. Because outbound links and ranking itself, is, at the end of the day, left to bots and algorithms.”

As long as a non-human is determining relevance, bad apples will always exist. Google has created the platform for all the spammers to spend their days learning and trying to figure out exactly how to manipulate. As long as Google continues to leave everything up to a search engine bot or an algorithm for ranking purposes we will always have a problem with spammers and black hat techniques.

The only way for Google to solve this problem is to require every single website that offers any search engine marketing to go through rigorous examination. Even then that won’t solve the problem. For Google it is probably much cheaper just to leave things the way they are.

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