How Search Engines Work
Search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. This means that, as a business owner, its important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the user initiating a search.
They use programs called ‘spiders’ to index websites. This spider is an automated program that crawls a website, reads the content on the it and follows the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository where the data is indexed. It will visit each link listed on the website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so its not recommended to have a website with more than 500 pages.
Benefits of Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing SMS is a great example of a new technology providing marketing opportunities. The growth in the mobile consumer market over the last ten years worldwide has been explosive, leading to a massive target market which has proven to be responsive to marketing messages. There are twice as many active SMS users than active email users, reflecting the full extent of the marketing opportunity presented by mobile communications.
But as a business owner, how can you capitalize on this growing technology with a mobile marketing SMS marketing campaign?
Social Media Survey
Social marketing, despite the fact that it has seemingly oversaturated the market, appears to still be growing – both as a way to get any message out or to promote a business.
Econsultancy recently conducted a survey to determine how big a role social marketing and online PR is playing for a cross-section of over 1000 businesses. The results seem to indicate that social marketing is being relatively underutilized as a business tool.
Report findings:
* Almost two-thirds (64%) of companies say they have experimented with social media but have not done much.
* Micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter) is now the most widely adopted social media tactic, used by 78% of company respondents.
The Eternal Domain Age Problem
So you’ve bought your website building software, figured out how it works, built a website to target your chosen niche, and added what you consider to be quality content. You’ve worked hard to get this far, but this is just the beginning. You need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.
Let’s say you decide to target organic traffic. In order to do this, you need to get a high ranking in the search engines for words or phrases related to your niche. Hopefully before you began building your website, you used researching tools to figure out the best words or phrases to use. Your entire website, from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text has been optimized for these words. continue reading…
Unique Selling Propositions
If you’ve been involved in sales and/or marketing for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the term “Unique Selling Proposition.” But just in case you haven’t, let me explain what a USP is.
A Unique Selling Proposition is what makes a business unique and/or different from all other businesses in its category. For example, the USP for a high-end restaurant, might include the exclusive clientele it serves, a specialized menu, white glove service, as well as other exclusive amenities.
Two Classic Unique Selling Propositions
To further illustrate what I’m talking about, following are two examples of the most famous and successful USP’s in the history of advertising:
