SEMbyDesign

September 11, 2008

Your Domain Name – the keys to your (online) mansion

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Traffic Building — Tags: — admin @ 10:50 am

I have talked in the past a bit about the importance of a good domain name, however, this post may even be a bit off subject for this blog. Keeping your domain name in your possession.

Recently, I have taken on 2 new clients who hired someone several years ago to build their site, and then let the site just sit there(a whole other blog post). Long story made short, we are looking at revamping their site, changing servers, etc, and they can’t get to their domain name to make the required changes.

One of the domains has page rank, has been around for a while and is getting very good traffic. We are looking to add ecommerce to it, and the current host can’t do what we need it to do. Getting in to the domain to change the name servers is proving to be a tricky task since the web guy who originally registered the domain for this client is difficult to get ahold of.

Business Owners, you should know that keeping track of your domain is very easy, and if you don’t have control over it, you should do so immediately. If someone besides you has control, you could have a difficult time getting to it the next time you need to, and think of all the items associated with the domain – your advertising, yellow pages, and most importantly, your email address. You don’t want to spend your time having to inform customers and associates of a new domain name – this could result in uncountable lost business.

September 9, 2008

Webmasters – earn money from your web site

Filed under: Marketing Your Site — Tags: — admin @ 8:31 am

Here’s a nice little way to get a monthly deposite in your PayPal account – Ads for your website. How this works is, you apply to post an ad on your website, and once it is reviewed and approved. Once you are approved, you can add urls for other sites, the company www.freebies4webmasters.co.uk pays you for each accepted url. Give it a try – you will be happy you did! This is a good way to add a little value to your blog or other site that you are having difficulty monetizing.

September 2, 2008

Google Adwords and your business

Filed under: Marketing Your Site — admin @ 10:22 am

Google adwords is a great low-cost way to begin marketing your business on line. I have been using the Google platform for a little over a year now, and find that most small businesses could use it effectively to advertise. Reasons to use Google Ad words – 1. You have a product or service that many people search for or research on the internet before buying; 2. You want to drive traffic to your site in an effort to build brand awareness; 3. You have tried traditional, expensive advertising methods like newspaper or direct mail with limited success.

If you have a service that lots of people research before purchasing, be the authority resource on that topic, and drive people to your site with a targeted ad that displays when these key words are used for a search. This is a great method, because you receive the benefit of the traffic being very targeted in that the visitor is searching for the exact information you are putting in front of them.

By being the authority, you will also benefit from the natural ranking that Google and other search engines give you when you have great content, and you will keep visitors coming back for more if you have excellent information that is updated regularly.

Thanks! If you would like to learn more about the Google adwords program, please feel free to contact me. And, as always please feel free to comment! All comments are dofollow after a user has left 3 or more!

August 7, 2008

Certified Adwords Professional!

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Work From Home — Tags: , — admin @ 10:18 pm

I am going to pat myself on the back for a second. I just got done taking the Google Certified Adwords Professional Exam, and I passed with flying colors. It was a difficult exam with lots of questions to try to trick you into clicking the wrong option, but I made it! I really enjoy putting together a good Adwords campaign, so if you are in Omaha, or anywhere else, for that matter and need some help with Adwords (or any similar CPC program like Yahoo or MSN for that matter) give me a shout!

I will post the official seal of the Adwords Professional as soon as I can, so as to comply with all the usage requirements, for all to see. I am pretty excited about this development in my professional freelance career here in Omaha. I think there is huge demand for it, and I think people should consider this type of advertising for *most* businesses. I have been successful with brick-and-mortar businesses, service businesses, and e-commerce businesses with CPC advertising.

Have fun out there! SEM

August 2, 2008

Picking a great domain name

Filed under: Marketing Your Site — Tags: , — admin @ 10:39 am

Picking a domain name is quite possibly one of the most important things you can do when you are starting up a site, and possibly one of the most difficult. Difficult, because many, many domains have already been registered. Here are some tips:
1. When you are researching, it is fairly important to have a keyword in your name – for instance if you are selling jewelry, you should have the word jewelry somewhere in the name.

2. Don’t make it too regional if you are thinking of a national or international audience – in the case of jewelry sales in Houston, JewelryDesignHouston.com would not be a good name if you were trying to appeal to a larger audience than the residents of Houston.

3. Unless you are a non-profit organization or a college or university, try to stick with the .com extension – no one can remember the other extensions, like .biz too easily.

4. Stay away from special characters and numbers in your name. Dashes and the numbers 0-9 don’t make for names that are easily remembered.

In general, practice trying to tell someone the name out loud or over the phone if you can say it without having to explain it that is best, for example, we’ll use 4example.com – “hello Bill, my domain is w w w . 4 the number 4 not spelled out example . com.” This makes for a very confused individual on the other end of the phone.

You can go to any domain registrar to find out if your name is available – if it is not, sites like Premium Domain Name Auctions should have a great selection of names, or people willing to sell you your dream domain name.

July 3, 2008

Article Submission For Traffic

Filed under: Content Development,Marketing Your Site — Tags: , , — admin @ 7:20 am

Often, I will recommend article submission as a way for my clients to send traffic to their web site. A couple of well written articles can provide you with great backlinks and some traffic directly from the article site. The basic premise behind this is that someone who wants the content that you have written will copy it, leaving the link to your site intact (per the terms of the site you submitted your article to). This places your link on other sites of like content, which is helpful in the Search Engine Optimization process. This is a win/win situation for both sites…you get backlinks, and they get content.

Several sites that provide submission services are available and they are usually free. I like ezinearticles.com – they seem to be the highest quality, and all articles are human reviewed before releasing them to be read by the public.

Don’t forget that you should re-write the article if you are submitting to more than one service, or taking it from your blog.

July 1, 2008

Not-So-Conventional ways of driving traffic to your site

Filed under: Marketing Your Site,Traffic Building — Tags: , — admin @ 7:33 am

In past posts I have discussed conventional ways of driving traffic to your site, like article marketing and pure content. today I am going to list some of the ways I have found that are somewhat unconventional – the guerrilla marketing of the web, if you will. All are legal, some cost, and some are free. I will be writing on each one in more detail, but today, my goal is to just introduce you to a handful.

1. Link exchanges: These can be good for getting your site exposed with little or no cost. Do they work? The short answer is: maybe.

2. Traffic exchanges: Same as with link exchanges – your site is exposed to lots of people, if it is a busy exchange…I am involved in one that is really pretty nice – linkreferral.com that can and has provided me with quite a lot of traffic, and it has been very good traffic to boot. Sometimes the traffic you get from these is not so great. I have gotten some great reviews on several sites from this simple method. It is free for basic membership or $50 for a lifetime membership.

3. Forum posting: This can take time, but can result in some great returns. It is generally free to join a forum, but it takes time to establish some sort of credibility there. Once you have posted a few times you generally can put a link to your site or several sites in your posting signature to direct people to your information or sales page. The traffic you get is pretty targeted if you join a forum that pertains to your sites subject.

4. Start a blog: I usually lose my clients at this suggestion, but if you have information that you can diligently write about, this absolutely works. This one comes back to content. Also, you can go post comments on other peoples blogs to direct traffic back to yours. It takes time and patience to get traffic this way.

5. Social Networking/Facebook/Squidoo/Digg/Stumble: All of these have their merits, and as with forum or blog posting, while these are free, it takes time to work these to make them effective.

I will have a whole post on Social networking in a while.

June 21, 2008

3 Marketing Tips that are inexpensive.

Filed under: Marketing Your Site — admin @ 9:54 am

My clients are generally small business people who enjoy 2 things: doing things for themselves, and doing them for cheap. In this post I am going to explore 3 marketing ideas that are free or very inexpensive.

1. The client is generally an expert in their field, say real estate. I usually recommend joining a forum or answering questions on yahoo answers. The more they can establish themselves as an expert, the better relationship they can establish with the participants of the forums. Place the link to your web site into the signature of your profile and this will translate into traffic to your site. Cost: Free – not including your time.

2. This tip may be more obvious to some, but simply putting your url into every available, newspaper ad, yellow pages ad, email signature, letterhead, and any other customer communication that your firm creates is often overlooked, and since you are doing these things anyway, adding the location of your website is very inexpensive. This may even include your back window of your vehicle(s).

3. One final tip is to start a newsletter. This is a commitment that some would be better off outsourcing, but it is relatively inexpensive to do it yourself. I usually recommend a service like ConstantContact.com to manage your list, send the emails and administer the emails. I have one client who implemented this and saw an increase in his traffic through the door of his practice in the week immediately following the release of the newsletter. Newsletter marketing is fairly inexpensive and can be more effective than direct mail if implemented properly – more about this in a future post.

Hope you enjoyed this post and Happy Marketing!

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