It would be great if you could easily get lots of links to your site from influential sites like Wikipedia or the New York Times. And have the links be a range such as annapolisrailings-stairs.com, www.annapolisrailings-stairs.com, Annapolis Railings Stairs, metal fabrication, etc. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy, or everyone would do it. Then with everyone having great links, it would mean they weren’t that valuable. So be glad it isn’t easy.

Why Do You Even Care About Links and What are They?

So, is there anything you can do to help? Oh, right, some explanation.  Some may find it obvious, but for those new to internet marketing, there is a good reason you want these links. Search engines use links from other sites to your site as a vote of confidence. If  people don’t like your website, they aren’t going to link their website to yours. So the more links that are going to your website the better. Also, if they are major websites, that is also a big deal.

First Get Links From Yourself

Well, the first thing you want to do is get citations and directory listings like Google My Business, BingPlaces, Yahoo Business, Yelp, FourSquare and others. All of these will link back to your website. This is a start, but doesn’t help a lot because they are essentially votes from yourself.

Trade Associations & Charities

If you are involved with any trade associations and can get a listing in their website that links back to your website, that could be very helpful if the trade association website has any power and influence. Another thing you can do is contact charities you are involved with. If your donate time or money, various charities often have sponsors listed on their website. If you can get a link from the charity website to your website, that can help as well.

Check Out Competitor’s Links

Another thing you can do is to use some software such as MajesticSEO to see what links your local competitors have. There may be organizations that would be happy to mention you or link to you that you haven’t thought about.

Rather than just hoping that people link to you, and having no control over how they do it, by taking this proactive approach, you can probably tell these organizations how you would like them to link to you. The link alone will help, but by influencing what and how they are linking, it will help your site get seen even more.

Different niches can be very different to rank in the same location depending on competition. For instance, real estate is going to be tough almost anywhere you want to rank for it. Used appliance stores selling used washers and dryers and other appliances don’t have that much competition and don’t seem to be that internet savvy, making it much easier to rank quickly.

How to Read Search Results

How do you know how much competition there will be? Do a search in Google or Bing or Yahoo. (Granted Google is the dominant one and has more searches done on it than probably the second and third place search engines combined.) What shows up on the first page of searches? Are there any companies that show up on the map?

Mix of Organic Listings Important

Don’t bother to look at the ads, but look at the organic results. In Google there are usually 10 results. What is the break down of these 10 results? Is it mostly local businesses? If so, there will probably be a lot of competition. If there are a number of national companies or directories, that is much better. At least currently, (it can always change) the search engines would prefer to show local companies. There are some companies/websites like homeadvisor and angieslist that list companies all over the US and sell leads based on the response they get on their website. Then there are directories like Yelp and Yellowpages.

If the 10 results are mostly things like this, it means the local companies in that niche haven’t done a very good job of search engine optimization.

Social Media Sites Filled Out?

Then do a search in Google+ for the companies that do show up. Have they filled out their Google+ page and have they claimed the site? Do the same for BingPlaces. If they aren’t filled out and aren’t claimed, that is another indication that they have not done a good job of optimization and that there isn’t much competition in this area for this niche.

Number of Citations?

Then you can check to see how many citations the top local websites have. If they only have something like 10 or 20, that is yet another indication that little has been done to get the website seen.

Most companies know their business backwards and forwards. Many have a handle on marketing. But a great many don’t yet understand digital marketing. Here are a number of mistakes that companies make.

These problems could be solved if they would hire someone, either an outside consultant or a full time employee or a part timer to handle some or all of what is covered below. Internet marketing is so key in today’s world that it is amazing that so many companies do it so poorly.

Social Media Presence

Most companies should pay attention to Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter. For Facebook, companies don’t post often, don’t respond to negative comments, don’t bother to get likes for their page, and sometimes their posts are unprofessional.

For Google + (or Google My Business), companies have minimal profiles with barely anything filled out. They have also not bothered to get the business verified which means it is not likely to show up on the maps in Google searches.

Similarly with Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter, profiles won’t have been filled out, there is little response and interaction with followers. Generally a missed chance at interacting with potential customers or current customers.

Reputation Management and Citations

There are many sites where people can give reviews of your company. Facebook and Google + are just two. There is also Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Foursquare, Angie’s List, BBB and many others. You need to first have your name, address and phone number listed on as many as possible and those items should be consistent across the different sites. This will make it possible for more people to find you when they do an online search. But, you also need to monitor the major ones to make sure there isn’t any negative feedback. If there is, you need to respond to it and be proactive.

Employee Involvement

Unfortunately if you do a search online what you sometimes find is unhappy employees trashing their company. Not a great way to grow the business. So you need to track that. But you also want employees linked to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. You want them giving positive feedback. It will help ensure their jobs and make raises more likely. They should be liking, sharing, retweeting and anything else they can do to promote the company.

Poor Design, Poor Monetization

Some websites are very minimal. Others are much more extensive and very pretty but they aren’t built to help bring in sales. Often it is difficult to find out where to find a form to fill in to get more information about the company or the products. There should be a simple way to do this on every single page. You never know which page of the website people are going to land on. They won’t always land on the home page. Also, often it is difficult to find the phone number and also difficult to find the email address. Is this some sort of weird stealth marketing? People get bored and frustrated fast. Make it as easy as possible to engage with your company in some way.

Is Your Website Current?

Often websites haven’t been touched in ages. They look out of date. There isn’t any recent information, no updates, no specials, nothing to generate recurring interest. Most importantly, they aren’t mobile friendly (which means they automatically reformat the display to be easily readable on cell phones). Did you realize that over half of internet searches are done on cell phones and tablets these days? Many websites are not designed to be easily read on a cell phone. This has a double negative involved. First is that most people won’t hassle with a website that does not work on cell phones. They will just find another (your competitor) that does. Secondly, Google and other search engines penalize websites that are not mobile friendly. This means they raise mobile friendly sites up in their search results and push your site down where it will never get seen. For those two reasons, you could be losing out on thousands of dollars of sales a year or potentially a month.

If you have ever read a blog post by someone from design luck. They always end with a sentence that starts with “The internet is noisy…” This is very correct, the internet is a noisy and jumbled up space. It’s littered and clogged up with the good, the bad and the ugly. The good- honestly useful stuff created by honest people to help or teach other people, sell some goods or render some services. There is the bad- harmless but not so useful content put up there. Masqueraded as useful stuff with the sole intent of attracting traffic and making a few quick bucks. The ugly… well malicious content by unscrupulous elements who don’t care about anyone else. There’s a lot of gray areas in between too.

Snap question: “How do you get your stuff to stand out among all of these?” What can you do to ensure that the people who need your content actually find it? Here are a few quick pointers to guide you in making your website more visible.

Develop Solid Content

Here is the most important place to start from. You can’t make people listen if you don’t have something solid to say. First of all, ignore all the ads and Search Engine Optimization and ranking and just develop some really strong content to go with your website. It is important that you learn your craft and you know your material. For some time now, I’ve read articles using the pocket app. I’ve come to realize that many articles and blogs out there are actually just from blog title generators. You go on to read the body and you realize it’s the shoddy job of some non-native speaking English kid freelancing with a laptop and modem. Nobody wants to read crappy stuff like that, the big companies won’t link to your website with that. Take the time to learn your material and really know it well. If you’ve not had the time to research, don’t bother putting anything up. The quality of the blogs on your website- even if they are short- will naturally attract traffic. I’ve experienced getting increased traffic simply from people sharing the link to a blog on my website through social media.

Learn the tools of the trade

In the previous section about solid content. I wrote “…ignore all the SEO and ads…” Well I was just kiddingJ. Despite the fact that everyone is talking about them and making a lot of noise. Tools like SEO and SEM are actually quite effective and people have been getting results from using them. This is not a Search engine tutorial, so sorry, I won’t be giving you any SEO tips. But here’s what I’ll suggest: Take time to really learn how these things work. Don’t just depend on cheap blogs and articles. Buy books, talk to experts and find out how these tools can help you increase traffic to your website.

There’s huge traffic on the internet, and it’s yours for the taking if you’re willing to put in the effort.

Powerful Strategies of Facebook Ad Targeting

You can target Facebook audiences with more than a dozen different ad formats and there are thousands of ad targeting parameters. The basic is about mastering your Facebook targeting strategy so that it brings you in front specifically and you can be motivated by your audience. Here are some robust Facebook ads targeting strategies that never fail.

Tap Among Facebook Users

Facebook ad targeting gives you to know a lot more about the users. You have the power to reach beyond the users CRM databases and to peep to have insights. Facebook advertisers make appropriate use of this data and target audience through various buying behaviors.

Purchasing behavior highlights Buyer Profiles, Food & Drink, Clothing, Health & Beauty and much more. The advantage is that within each broad subcategory, drill different types of behavior; for instance, on choosing Buyer Profiles will give you way to target Fashionistas, Foodies, etc.

Facebook shows you the path of the user profiles to target in each subcategory, depending on their offline transaction data that they use. Explore and get more audiences.

Get Creative Using Life Events

Certain businesses types base their selling experiencing major life events. For instance, funeral homes apparently wish to connect with users who have ill people or with people planning a funeral or have lost or may be losing soon their loved ones. In the same way the moving services wish to reach you if you have just bought an apartment or a new house, while the wedding photographers are on the lookout for recently engaged couples or their family.

Facebook has enough and more conceivable life event targeting options, since people post these to the timelines. The parameter of Life Events is unique allowing you to target people at right intervals even after the change. For instance, a jewelry company may contact or show interest in people celebrating their first anniversary. This gives more target audience members who are also one year newlyweds.

Develop Leads & Loyalty with Facebook Routine Audiences

Facebook routine audiences enable connecting on Facebook using your existing contacts. They easily get in front of your app users and existing customers on their social network, thereby strengthen the brand and this also provides the chance to increase customer value, loyalty and order frequency for lifetime. You can increase the campaigns efficacy and in case you are providing to new users a free trial, you can always keep your loyal customers out of this trial.

Regular audiences get created using your email list or by uploading customer phone list. You can create routine audience depending on your site visitors or on their actions taken within your app or game.

You may be great at SEO, or social media, or citations or any of the other aspects that go into internet marketing and ranking and lead generation. But you need to do it for yourself as well as for other people or you won’t have any customers to do it for.

Social Media

One way is to have a presence on social media, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. You can use programs like Hootsuite to post on a regular basis. You can create many posts and schedule the out into the future when you want them to post. That will help. You also want to take advantage of Edge Rank in Facebook. It looks at how many likes and comments a post is getting and if it is popular then it will put it out to a wider audience still. So if you can get a group of friends to like and comment on a post about your business, you can get a broader viewership than you normally would. It helps if there is something compelling in the post.

Emails

You can also choose a target sector and send out emails and just play the percentages. If the email is well written and eye catching, you will get some responses. It is a numbers game and you just need to have large enough numbers.

Videos

Another way you can get the word out to people is to create videos. Screencastomatic has a good service for creating videos. You can look for people with websites that need help and do a free evaluation, explaining that their site is not mobile friendly or they don’t have enough citations or back links, or their content isn’t robust enough or their phone number isn’t prominent enough or they make it too hard to find a form to fill out. Any or all of these. Create the video and send it to them in an email. Some will call back and others you will have to follow up with a phone call.

Cold Calling

Ultimately you want most of your business to come from referrals because those are warm leads and much easier to close. But before you get to that point, will probably need to get on the phone and do some cold calling. Or drive to businesses and speak with owners one on one.

Salesperson

Another possibility is to hire a sales person on a straight commission basis. You don’t want just any salesperson, you want a superstar. Don’t put in an average salary target, put the top end in the ad. Putting an average income in an ad will attract an average salesperson. Putting a high income will attract a superstar. To find out a lot more about this, get the book The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. He goes into detail about how to attract the person you need.

SEO

Have your own site to attract business and do all the things that you would do for anyone else to get your website ranking and business coming in.

Consistent Action

Whatever you choose, whether it is videos, emails, cold calling, the key is to be consistent and do it at a high enough level to get results. Also, the more you do it, the better you will get at it and your closing ratio will improve. Don’t be afraid to be pushy (in a nice way).

If you use Facebook, you may or may not have heard about Edge Rank. If you haven’t and you aren’t just using FB for fun but trying to promote a business, you may be interested to know more about edge rank.

Most people know that Google has algorithms that determine how a website ranks when someone does a search.There are many criteria that go into it. Well, Facebook has an algorithm that determines how widely a post is seen. You probably realize that not everyone you are friends with sees every post that you do. If Facebook put everything on your News feed that all your friends posted, you would be overwhelmed. So Facebook tries to figure out what you might be most interested in and puts that on the news feed.

When your friends do something on Facebook, it generates a potential News feed story. In Facebook jargon each one is called an Edge.

So, how does the algorithm work to determine which stories or Edges you see? There are 3 main factors:

• Affinity score
• Edge Weight
• Time decay factor

Affinity Score

This is how connected you are to someone else. If you are friends with them, interact with them on a regular basis, have a lot of mutual friends, write regularly on their wall, you will have a high affinity score with that person and what you post is more likely to show up on their news feed. Different actions have different weights. The higher the effort involved and the more interest inherently shown, the more it will boost the score. So just viewing a post does nothing. Clicking on a post gives some score, liking it gives more, commenting on it still more and sharing is at the top.

Edge Weight

Each Edge has a weight. If you just like something, your friends aren’t too likely to see that. If you comment on something, they are much more likely to see that. Facebook ranks different actions depending on what they think you will find most interesting. For instance, Facebook ranks videos and pictures in a post higher than a link. When Facebook adds a new feature they put the weight high for that so you see a lot of the new feature. Then they decrease it over time to a more normal level.

Time Decay Factor

Facebook is not going to be putting up things from a year ago. In other words, there is not a single edge rank score. It constantly changes and decays with time since Facebook is constantly looking for what is new to catch your interest.

It is impossible to determine an edge rank score and you would go crazy trying to since it is different for everyone you interact with. In fact, the edge rank between you and a friend is different than the rank between them and you. That is because you might look at their posts more than they do yours or a number of other reasons. However, you can get a feel for the effects of edge rank by seeing how many people you reach with a post. The posts with more comments and likes will be seen by more people since Facebook thinks that this must be an interesting conversation if a number of people are commenting on it.

A guy named Charles F… has come out with an ebook on internet marketing warfare. He is only something like 18 years old but according to him he has accomplished quite a bit in his life. He says that the ebook will show how to make war and win the war in internet marketing. But he admits that not all of it may be ethical. This gives us pause since that may be a winning strategy short term, but may not be the best strategy long term.

One thing he seems to be saying is that in certain down and dirty niches, people will do link attacks where they link spammy sites to competing sites. We agree with his statement that it doesn’t seem very ethical. Yet, at the same time, he has said he has been the subject of such attacks once he has made it into the top 20 for some keywords.

He says that many attacks don’t work because they look like attacks. Too much, too fast and Google discounts it. He said it needs to be done over more time and mixed in with other things so it looks like a normal SEO campaign that is incompetent or being stretched a bit. Use SEMRush to see what pages are ranking and what keywords they rank for. Then use ahrefs to see what link building has been done.

He also talks about doing links from guest blog posts. He gets content using Fiverr and Textbroker. Then getting some Viagra or pay day loan sites for links. And, if you have a penalized site, redirect it to a competitor. This guy is way too creative in thinking about how to mess with other people. He should be figuring out how to make his stuff better, not other people’s worse.

Then he talks about scraping content from competitor’s sites and creating other sites so it looks like there is duplicate content. He says that it should be that the original content is good and copies are penalized. But, he says that often Google will treat sites with better links as the original. So if you create a site and get links to it, then you could confuse the search engines about which was original.

Man, we are such goody two shoes that we didn’t even know this sort of stuff was going on. This is just the beginning of what he wrote. Our guess is that he also discusses doing bad reviews of other people among many other things. If he is doing this and said he has been the victim of it as well, it is probably more widespread than we would have ever guessed. C’est dommage.

Mobile Friendly – Yes or No?

Why should you care about whether your website is mobile friendly or not? Well, if you are spending any money on your website and on things to get leads from the internet then you should care.  If you depend on your website for leads then you should definitely care. Why? There are two main reasons.

What is Mobile Friendly?

But first, what is mobile friendly? Before smart phones and tablets became so popular web designers didn’t have to worry about display formats. Everything was fairly standardized. When mobile phones came along, this changed. When you tried to look at a website on a mobile phone, you could only see a little bit of the page and had to scroll left and right to read it. Not much fun. So then developers learned to sense what type of screen the site was being viewed on and format it to fit so that it was easily readable.

Missing Half Your Audience

The first is that you are missing half your potential audience if you aren’t mobile friendly. Said another way, you could be getting twice as many leads if you were mobile friendly. Possibly even a lot more depending on what type of business you have. Why? First, over half of all internet searches are done on smart phones and tablets. So if you aren’t mobile friendly, people will just close your site and find one that is mobile friendly. Second, what is most of the searches are done on smart phones? You are missing most of your possible leads. Think about tow trucks. How many searches for tow trucks do you think are done on desk top computers? Probably not a large percentage.

Upsetting the Search Engines – Not Good!

The second reason to be mobile friendly is the search engines. Search engines like Google want their users to have a good experience and to like the websites that are found in the search. Websites that aren’t mobile friendly do not fit this criteria. So about a year ago, they decided to give a boost in ranking to websites that were mobile friendly and to push down in searches websites that were not mobile friendly. Considering that 75% of people never leave the first page of a search, this is a big problem for companies who do not have mobile friendly sites.

So, if your website isn’t mobile friendly, shame on you. Go get something done about it!

For many companies, spending money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes a lot of sense. That is because almost no one uses a phone book anymore. The first place they go to look for something is the internet. If you don’t show up in their search, you don’t get the business.

A Website Is Not Enough

Creating a website is not enough. If you don’t do things to cause people to find your website, no one will ever see it. And a business that doesn’t do any marketing usually isn’t going to survive. Search Engine Optimization helps raise your website in the rankings so that people will find it when they search and you aren’t buried on page 22 when they do a search.

What if People Don’t Know They Need Your Product?

But, what if people aren’t searching for what you offer? You can have your website at the top of page one for your keywords, but if people aren’t searching for those keywords, you have wasted money on the search engine optimization.

For instance, you have a company that sells a range of goods from mugs to travel accessories to shower amenities such as items to hold shampoo and other items. You aren’t set up to sell to individuals. You sell to stores nationwide and you sell chain stores and also through buyers. They may find you by an internet search, but you will probably need to be more proactive in going to them instead of hoping that they might do an online search that finds you.

Another example would be a company that does cyber security for small to mid-size companies. If the companies don’t think they have a problem in that area, they won’t be searching for your services and therefore will not find you. Here again, you need other strategies besides just search engine optimization.

How to Appeal to More than 3%

Chet Holmes in The Ultimate Sales Machine points out that at any one time there are only 3% of the people who are actively looking for what your provide. Another 6 to 7% are open to what you provide, 30% are not thinking about it, 30% don’t think they need it and 30% know they have no interest in it.

So, how do you appeal to more than the 3%? By pitching information instead of your product or service. You could do this by advertising online to places where your target audience will be looking but not necessarily for your product. For instance you could offer a report on the 5 ways companies are vulnerable to cyber attacks that they aren’t aware of, or something of this nature. Make it educational, give suggestions on how to remedy and then put in some information about what you do.

You could also organize a meeting or even a conference around that same concept. It can’t be a sales pitch for your product. You need to provide information that is of value to them that leads them naturally to what you do or make. Similar information should be on the website to complement your other marketing efforts.

Multi-level Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing is very popular. It is used to sell vitamins, beauty products and many others as well. It generally requires face to face selling but some people use the internet to gain a down line.

Many people are attracted to the possibilities of large dollars to be made. Unfortunately, that is the exception and not the rule. Most people are not good at sales and aren’t aggressive enough and stick with it long enough to build a self sustaining downline. In fact a self sustaining downline is almost a myth because there is so much attrition. Other than a few companies that have been around for decades, most of the companies don’t last that long.

In fact one article claims that only around 50 MLM companies have lasted 10 years or longer. What happens is that when they have found as many suckers (I mean customers) as possible and have saturated the market, a new company gets started. Everyone likes to get in on the ground floor because that is where the money is made. The movers and shaker with big downlines get brought in and they bring as many of their prior downlines as possible and clean up. The people below them make a bit more for a while and them max out. So, on to the next company.

Funky Math

The problem is the math. It is not exactly a Ponzi scheme, but close enough. When you look at the compensation plan and figure out what it would take to make $100,000 per year and then look at the number of people you would need in your down line and how much they would need to buy, it is daunting. But, if you have any integrity, you want the people in your downline to succeed as well. This is where the problem with the math comes in. You discover that to have a number of your downline succeed as well, you start needing the entire population of the United States to sign up. It just isn’t sustainable.

One positive though is the comradery and the positive reinforcement that can help some people get out of a rut and succeed in life even if it isn’t at MLM. On the other hand, there are a lot of garages and basements full of unused product.

In terms of internet marketing, many companies require that you use the websites that they provide for you. You aren’t allowed to set up your own independent site. That makes it very difficult to use the internet effectively.

Sell the Knowledge, Not the Product

One person came up with a different solution which is typical of good internet marketing. Give information away for free to get people hooked and then upsell them. She now sells something called the Renegade Network Marketing System. She started out by putting up a blog with nutritional info. People liked it enough that they told friends and she started signing people up to her nutritional MLM company. But then she found out that people liked the product but couldn’t duplicate her on the business side.

So she decided to teach her system and sell that. She developed a free ebook to get people interested and then sold her system. So now she can sell to people in all the MLM companies. Pretty smart. Kind of like in the California gold rush. Do you know who really became wealthy during that time? It was some of the people with stores that sold jeans and shovels and things like that. They became some of the major corporations in California and a number still exist to this day.