Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

When you were little, did you ever have to travel for Christmas? Remember how scared you were that Santa wouldn’t know you weren’t home? I remember writing letters and nagging my parents to make SURE he knew we weren’t going to be home for Christmas.

If you could just capture a thread of that nervous energy and use it to start a fire to get your social media icons on your website and other promotional items – that would be swell. I see so many companies that have a decent presence on social media sites, a great newsletter or a great blog but there is little to no mention of it on their site. Your additional internet marketing efforts should be integrated into the other forms of marketing you are doing… not be separated.

Someone may be in the research phase of their buying process and come across your company. Perhaps they aren’t ready to buy but if they started following your Twitter account, Like you on Facebook, sign up for your email newsletter, subscribe to your blog etc., when they are ready to buy you stand a better chance of being on the top of their mind.

Letting people know where else they can find your content is as easy as adding icons to your website or promotional items. You could also add widgets for social media sites and email newsletter signup boxes right on other pages of your site.

Integrate all of your marketing efforts that you can! Just like you didn’t want Santa dropping your loot off at the wrong house, you don’t want your next customers subscribing to your competitors content over yours!

Photo credit: kdonovan_gaddy

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Thanksgiving Day, every year the same two local radio stations drop their format and go straight to 24/7 Christmas music. Some will cry it is too much. Some will say it is overkill. But… when you feel that twinge of holiday spirit creep in your bones, you know what channels you will be turning the dial to.

So here WE are again for another year to do our Advent Blog schedule – to be consistent. People like consistency. They like knowing what they are going to get. Throughout the year people bring up this series to me. They like it. We like doing it so it is a win-win.

Of course there is always room to surprise people but being dependable for what people want is one of the best things you can do for your business and your marketing messages.

Three places where being consistent will help your internet marketing

1. Keep your website consistent with your industry and with websites in general – Many creatives will disagree with me here but this really depends on your business. If you are in the B2B industry, people are coming to your site to research your company and your services, they are coming for information and they are coming to gather data so they can make a buying decision. While they are collecting that information, they don’t want to learn how to use your website. There are things they have become dependent on like easy to use navigation, an About Us page, product pages etc.
2. Keep your messaging and tone consistent – Make sure the content on your website, blog and social media profiles are consistent. Although many blogs and social media profiles often have a more personal tone, don’t let it be the exact opposite of your company site. A person may get to know you through your social media accounts first and you don’t want them to feel like they got duped when they visit your site.
3. Keep the your posting schedule consistent – If you have an email newsletter, blog or social media profiles you should try to keep how often you post to them somewhat regular. There is something dependable about knowing I am getting a newsletter each week or month. A blog or social media site that sits stagnant for months and then posts in bursts is hard to get any traction on. Space your posting out and make yourself accountable to get things out on a regular basis.

And so beings our consistent routine with the 2011 Advent Schedule! Enjoy!

I was recently talking about blog subscribers versus blog readers with a friend and then I saw this great post from Convince and Convert on his opinion of how to get more blog subscribers.

As you create your blogging goals and strategy, you should have an idea of who you are writing for and make a note of the data points you are going to measure to determine if your blogging initiative is working or if it isn’t. One thing to think about is if you are writing for subscribers or readers.

A blog reader is someone new who stumbles upon your blog because someone shared it with them, they searched for something and you came up in their search results, they found it on a social media site, etc. A blog reader will then read your post, marvel at how smart you are and then carry on with their merry day. They also could do other things like contact you, buy your product online, download your ebook, etc. but generally they come, they read and then they go.

The amount of blog readers you have can be measured by how many visits you blog posts are getting and maybe even how many unique visitors your blog is getting.

A blog subscriber is someone who actually subscribes to your blog. They choose to either receive your blog via RSS or email and each time you publish something, it is sent to them. They have subscribed to your blog because they are a fan, they love your products, they like what you have, and they feel like you are speaking specifically to them. You can measure your blog subscribers in your blog admin section (if you allow subscribers).

How do you get more blog readers?

• Have catchy, attention-grabbing blog titles
• Make sure your posts are helpful so people want to share them
• Have a good social media presence
• Try bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon to reach new readers
• Tie in current news and events where applicable – capitalize on people searching for those phrases or talking about them
• Link to other blogs in your posts
• Invite guest bloggers to post for you
• Interview experts in your field
• Post lists (top ten way to…)
• Write about what you know about

How do you get more blog subscribers?

• Narrow your blog’s focus to a specific group of people
• Make sure it is easy to subscribe to your blog
• Network on other blogs and forums in the niche you are trying to get attention in
• Give your subscribers information they won’t get anywhere else
• Post regularly, let people get accustomed to how often they will hear from you
• Build a brand and community (#21 on SEOmoz’s oldie-but-Goodie-list)
• Ask them to subscribe – add a line at the end of your post, ask people on social networks, popups, etc.
• Write about what you care about

Which is better is up to you. It depends on your goals, your products or services and what you are trying to accomplish. Understand the difference between blog readers and subscribers and which you are trying to reach, then tailor your posts to grab specifically their attention.

What other tactics to do you use get more readers or subscribers? Which do you feel is more valuable for your business?

Image source: g_kovacs

By now we know that beyond your site design and ease of navigation, the heart and soul of your site is the content that is provided there. Often times we ask our clients to figure out what content is working for them; what brings them traffic, what is being shared, what gets people to stay and convert? In some cases it might be obvious what content is popular but many times you have to do a little digging to really see which content are your real all stars.

Thanks to my pal, Google Analytics, the Content Report offers a variety of ways to look at the content on your site and will offer you a better understanding of what kinds of content to continue expanding on. Just by viewing your Content Dashboard you can see the top 10 most visited pages (organized by pageviews for that given time period) and then you can click “view full report” to see more data about those top visited pages. You can start to see which content is:

• Most popular – Organized by the number of pageviews. You can change the date range if you want to see what content was popular over a longer period of time or at a different time altogether.
• Stickiest – In Google Analytics you can click on the top of each column to reorganize the pages by different information (see image of columns below). By organizing the pages by average time on site, you can see which pages people spent the most time engaging with certain content.
• Best retainer – Find out which content keeps the visitor on the site. Organize your website by bounce rate to see which pages kept the user from leaving (the smaller number the better!).

Dig Deeper

After completing the exercise above you’ll start to see some content pages as all stars for your website. With some other content reports available you can dig a bit deeper to see why they might be performing so well.

• Keyword Traffic – One way to understand why certain pages are performing better than others is to determine if the subject matter is something that your audience is interested in. First off, you have to understand what keywords are bringing organic traffic to your site.  Then, in the top content section, you can click a content page and then select secondary dimensions to review for those pages; like traffic sources, visitors, technology, and content. Since I know that the blog, “What is a QR Code” was one of my most popular pieces of content, I want to look at what keywords (under “Traffic Sources”) people typed into search engines that then navigated them to this post. I can know that a large amount of organic traffic was driven by the keywords “smartphone scan box” and “scan box code”and that is verified when I look at the keywords that drive traffic to that particular blog post.
• Entrance Sources – Using secondary dimensions again, you can find out where the traffic that ended up on a certain page had been prior to coming to the website. It might be helpful to understand that your most popular or most engaging content pages came from visitors who were on Twitter. You can find that out by reviewing your entrance sources for certain content pages.
• Navigation Summary – Use the navigation summary to understand more about the how the traffic moves throughout the site while interacting with your known “all star content.” You can see where they had been before a particular page and where they went to after visiting that page. You can see how often a certain page was an entrance page as well as how often a certain page was the last page that a user was on before leaving the site. This just gives you some depth of knowledge about where your opportunities might be or areas of the site that might need to be improved

Big Opportunity

The whole point of understanding which content is making a splash is to continue producing more content around the topics that are more popular to help drive new traffic to your website. You should also take a look at the actual content page – what is your offer? Is it clear? Are you obtaining leads from that page? Understanding your content all stars reminds you that those pages are a good opportunity to get the engaged traffic to take action and convert.