Here is a quick multimedia stype powerpoint that will walk you through some of the points of Internet marketing and how that can be used best!  Our next entry is going to actually show these techniques in action so stay tuned!

Great Lakes Case and Cabinet came to us with over 1200 pages on a site that was originally built in the late 90’s.  The navigation was convoluted.  Their sales reps and customers were getting lost in the page.  And they just needed a general refresher!

So here is their redesign!  In total, we took their original site and built four subsites - Standard product, Broadcast Sound and Security, International and Manufacturing!  It truly is a great turnaround and we had a pleasure working with the company!

One of the main problems that we have heard from a lot of people is they don’t have 30 or 45 minutes a day (week) to sit down and take in all the training we give them.  They have all kinds of time in between meetings and client sessions, but no time at night!

So, we put together BulletProof Marketing - the Internet marketing training delivered right to your inbox!

I know personally, most of my email reading is done through my Blackberry.  And that’s how a lot of people are.  So Bulletproof marketing is designed to deliver the same high quality information in weekly snippets through email.

Best yet, we are giving away a great gift AND a free trial!  So there’s no risk to sign up.  I can guarantee though, if you take the time to read the info, analyze and evaluate it for the first month - you won’t be able to wait for the high level topics we will be discussing down the road!

To get more info and to sign up, visit http://trybulletproof.com!

Below are seven ways that will help you target local customers in your business endeavors:

1. Learn how to get the best results out of LOCAL online advertising - such as online magazines, local pay per click programs, and community portals.
2. Know your target customer - In order to be effective in any marketing effort, you have to know who you are trying to reach. The days of mass marketing and the budgets that accompanied those programs are long gone.
3. Focus on increasing sales - You want a long term, repeat customer. Focus on your conversion rates, not just your traffic. For every 100 people that walk in you store or find their way to your site, figure out how many actually spend money?
4. Analyze the publishers - make sure your advertising channel is one that fits your target market. You aren’t going to find many 18 year old, newspaper readers. Instead, do some radio advertising or some pay per click programs that target that demographic.
5. Use third party ad services - whether the third party advertising services is comprised of a marketing team or a solutions provider like us here at Tech Solution, use someone else to do your ad blitz. It helps promote creativity and allows for better penetration in a market. In other words, most businesses are in so deep, they don’t realize what their customers want. They know only what they have to offer.
6. Use landing pages - I can’t stress this enough. Especially on the Internet, you have to show people where to go based on navigational elements. If you let someone wander around your site, they will take no action, leaving you with an empty wallet.
7. Use rich media - Don’t be afraid of flash and video. Both can be dynamic additions to your web presence and your advertising campaign. They help spur sales and conversion rates because they are a dramatic media. Don’t get gaudy though!

Some people will try to get you to sign up for banner ad networks and billboard ads, but resist the temptation. In terms of overall return on investment, these two areas are weak at best. If you follow at least a couple of the above posted points, I guarantee you an increase in conversion and brand recognition among your local community.

[via iMediaConnection]

Here is a quick recap of what will be going on:

1. How search engines list websites for free and through paid placements
2. How to get free organic traffic (search engine optimization (seo))
3. How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
4. How to calulate the ROI of your search marketing efforts
5. Whats coming next!

For additional information about the Toronto event and other conferences in the series, visit www.searchenginestrategies.com.

Below you will find some tips and tricks of the SEM industry. These are things we do on a repeated basis, but you should be aware of them in your personal ad campaigns too.

1. First step - use all the keywords that are justifiable for your product or target market.  Keep your bids low to see what terms are searched the most.
2. Take mispellings and domain names into account.  Also include your product names.
3. Make your ads clickable with a call to action.
4. Once you are familiar with ad placement and keywords, split it up into individual campaigns.
5. Do some research on dynamic keyword insertion.  This will put the keyword that the user searched for in your ad automatically.
6. Don’t waste your money trying to be in the top position.
7. Make sure you apply the right metrics to account for the end result.  In essence, if you are trying to sell something, make sure the SEM program is tracking it.
8. Start with $5.00 a day and increase as you refine.
9. If you only offer a product to a local area, don’t market to the whole world.
10. Make sure to check out the tutorials the SEM agency provides.  It will help with conversion.

If you can think of anything else, let me know!

Search Engine Friendly is a great marketing technique when selling your software online. A customer wants search engine to be able to crawl through the content with little to no resistence. That’s the only way that they will get natural traffic! But Search Engine Friendly isn’t a save-all for seo.

Generally speaking, the term “search engine friendly” describes design elements, menus, URLs, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize, while search engine optimization is all about improving the volume and quality of search-referred traffic to a website.

When a piece of software is regarded as search engine friendly, it points to the features, not the effectiveness. It takes a webmaster to be effective. It takes someone who knows what the hell they are doing, and not someone just publishing content the is relatively meaningless.

For more great information, check out search engine land. The article is very well written and informative.

I probably don’t have to tell you - this is where most people fail. Well, one of the areas. A lot of people don’t go forward with getting backlinks either, but that is besides the point. We will handle that a bit later. We are going to work in top down fashion though, starting with the domain name. Some schools of thought say that a keyword rich domain name is important for overall search ranking. I advise against that, though. Having keywords in the domain name are nice, but not essential. The highest PR ranking sites on the Internet don’t have keywords in them, but they are brand names (which you could argue are keywords in a sense).

The title of the web page is important though. You want a couple of your keywords in the title. If you don’t know where to find it or how to change it, you have to look in the <title>YOUR KEYWORDS HERE< /title> part of the html coding. Change that tag, and it changes the title of your web page.

Next is the name of your webpage, or site (depending on how you are setting it up). Make sure the keywords are there, and the font is big, like <h1> big. Then you generally have a subtitle. Once again, put your keywords in there and make sure it has a <h2> tag.

From here, you have to play it by ear. You want the title of your article to have keywords in it, because it is generally in bigger font and has bold faced type. Google looks at both things as a factor for page rank. You want your keywords to be spread through the text often, but not so often that it is unreadable. After all, you are writing for a client or a customer, not for Google.

You want to use variations of text; such as the key term ‘promotional marketing’ can be interchanged with marketing promotion. Yahoo likes variations like this.

A couple other considerations are with your categories or tags, as is popular in blogs. Tags are one more spot that help your rank for a keyword. Sometimes, it will even give you two extra placements in the text. Categories are another. The little tag that says, this article is in ’seo’ is crucial to add some forgotten keywords to your copy.

Tomorrow, we are going to discuss linking. Hopefully, I gave you a good 50,000 foot view of search engine optimization keywords. There will be more detailed articles to come, but I thought this is a nice way to familiarize you with some terms and thoughts.

This also marks the beginning of an article series dedicated to improving your site’s SEO, or search engine rankings.  The first topic we are going to discuss is Choosing the right keywords.

Choosing Keywords

The absolute first step in search engine optimization, well after the actual web page build, is to find your keywords.  These keywords are search terms users put into search engines to find you.  Picking the right keywords can be tricky though.

My favorite tool to use is the Keyword Selector Tool found at overture.com.  Truthfully, it has gotten a little slow over the years because almost every seo expert uses it, but it is worthwhile nonetheless.

Imagine you are a visitor, looking for a service like yours.  What would you type in?  Think of two or three word search terms because it is easier to rank for those.  Take for example, “Online Transcription Service.”  It describes a would-be business and would be semi easy to rank for in the search results.

Now, when you type something into overture, say “business” and see it is searched 14,000 times a day, don’t even try to optimize for it.  How many sites on the Internet are already there?  Countless.  There isn’t a chance that you would be able to surpass them.

Take a lesser typed in phrase, such as “online business opportunity.”  That phrase will be easier to target and easier to rank for.  It isn’t that the keyword phrase is less important, just that it is lesser known.  That way when someone types “online business opportunity” into Google, the chances of you being on the front page are a lot greater.

Tomorrow, we are going to talk about actually using the information you found today in your site!

This is completely true. We have done it in the past for some of our smaller clients who are still building content. Search Engine Optimization can be effective if for only one, good, targetted web page.

It is important to go back to that page and update the content accordingly, though. Take notice of some of the competitors keywords, evaluate them through various keyword research tools, and look for keyword phrases that may be beneficial. Clean up the title a bit, as well. Then link to that article from your home page and with any other sites that you operate.

One good tip in the article is to select something that is not too competitive in regards to keywords. Don’t select a keyword phrase from the top of the list. Try for something that you have a good chance of ranking well in Google or Yahoo.

The other tip from promotionworld.com is that it is beneficial to comment on forums and blogs. Being a blogger, I can tell you this is one of the best methods to both get traffic and linkbacks. Oftentimes, bloggers have a plugin that will show on the front page the recent comment entries or the person with the most comments in a given month (or other period of time). This is nice for a quick Google spider spike and will help with getting visitors to your site.

So the next time you are looking to promote your site, but have minimal time or money, seo a couple pages and monitor the results. Then start commenting on sites in the same niche. It is a surefire way to increase traffic.