Best use of a marketing budget of $500

One of the most difficult things to do when starting out in SEO is to determine how to allocate the resources you have to guarantee the best ROI (return on investment).  Ecommerce store owners have a harder time of it as they are trying to spread their marketing dollars out across literally hundreds of keywords for all of the products on their stores.  Many times clients send us lists of hundreds of keywords and want to know how to best narrow the list down and how to best allocate the resources they have.  Here is what we tell them.

1. Narrow your keyword list to 5 keywords.  With a budget of $500 per month, it is best to focus on a short list of 5 keywords.  You can much easier track your results and get results quicker which will in turn open up your budget to focus on more keywords.  To avoid getting a penalty from google you will want to have 5 keywords but only 2-3 urls.  This means that you will need to have some of the keywords be variations of the main keyword.  First step is to narrow your list to a short list of 20-40 keywords.  Organize them by search volume.  The second step is to check the all in anchor ranking for all of the 20-40 keywords on your list.  For any that you already have an all in anchor ranking in the top 20, then put those on your shortlist of keywords to choose from.  If a keyword has an all in anchor ranking in the top 20 it is going to be easier to push it to the top 10 or top 3 in the search engines than a keyword that you are not ranking in the top 100 for according to all in anchor.

2. Article writing.  For article writing you can choose to get a few high quality articles from a US writer or a lot more articles from a Philippine writer.  My advice is that if you are going to be placing the articles on your website, then always use US writers.  If the articles are going to be used for link building and you are not YET a Fortune 5000 company, then Philippine writers are awesome! 

3. Article Marketing.  Now that you have the articles, what to do with them!  My recommendation is that the first place to always start is article marketing.  You can create accounts on the article directories or outsource it.  There are also some distribution services such as isnare.com and submityourarticle.com that will submit your article over multiple websites.  The monthly fee for sites such as these range from a few dollars per article to about $47 per month.  You can put a project on odesk.com for someone to submit your articles to the article directories and provide them the article and a list of sites and your work is done!

4. Blog commenting.  Although thought of as a spammy link building method by most, when done correctly, blog commenting is one of the best ways to build up a lot of backlinks to your site on unique ips.  You can either do the blog commenting yourself or outsource it.

5. Reporting.  Before you begin you will either want to run a report on the allinanchor rankings and number of backlinks according to open site explorer or outsource the report. 

There you have it!  The above is pretty much the exact strategy we recommend and implement for a budget of $500.

More Tips for Tweeting on Twitter

If you signed up for Twitter and just love sharing things that you have learned that are making your business bigger and better you probably have some of the basics of tweeting down. Maybe you read our post “Tweet, Retweet, Hashtags: The New Language of Social Media” that showed you a few of the basics. If you are finding that Twitter has been an amazing tool for your business and are in need of more, this article will take your tweets to the next level. While tweeting can be a great way to share information you shouldn’t forget that Twitter is a two-way-street and may teach you a few things, too.

A great tool, that isn’t the easiest to find, is Twitter’s advanced search. The advanced search feature can help you find posts about a term, a person, a topic, a location or even a certain date. The tool can be found by scrolling to the bottom of any page on Twitter and look for the “Search” link. There is also another link there that lists all the Twitter search operators like “from:” which allows you to find tweets from a specific person or shows you that putting words in quotes to find tweets about a specific term. Advanced search can really help you find information on exactly what you may need help with at the moment you need it.

Another cool feature that is available to Twitter users that also have a Facebook account is the ability to install Twitter on Facebook. This allows you to update your status in one place, instead of two and keep your social media endeavors efficient. All you need to do is go to twitter.com/widgets/facebook and click on the button that says “Install Twitter on Facebook”. You will be taken through a few steps and you can choose to either let Twitter update your Facebook or Facebook update your Twitter status. It is a bit easier to configure your Twitter account to update your Facebook and doing things this way will help you keep your tweets to the 140 character limit.

If you are used to desktop applications like AOL Instant Messenger there is a Twitter application that can be added to your desktop to make tweeting a breeze. Digsby is an application that Windows users can use to view postings from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all your email accounts in a long window that looks like an instant messenger window on steroids. It is a great way to keep track of things without having to sign in to multiple accounts. If you like a larger view you can use an application called TweetDeck which allows you to personalize how you see your tweets and can also be configured to see your Facebook updates and also has a ton of other features.

If you have realized how important social media marketing is to your business, it is important to make the process as efficient as possible, or you can easily find yourself spending all your time tweeting and updating your Facebook account. While these tools can be amazingly beneficial to you, it is a good idea to specify how much time each day you want to dedicate to this form of marketing. Remember, it is very important to utilize multiple marketing techniques for your business and never put all of your eggs in one marketing basket.

Keeping Your Social Media Strategy Professional

For those of us that have Twitter and Facebook accounts it can be a difficult task to determine how to keep things professional if your main focus is to build a strong business network. Even if you start with the intention of keeping things professional, all it takes is one tweet or one photo to transform a professional site into something that some may find a bit unprofessional. We love social media sites because things are so instantaneous, but we forget that a single tweet can generate a rush of replies in mere seconds. So, policing your own accounts can become a full-time job. It is very important to make the purpose of your account clear from the first moment it is activated.

One of the things that can cause an issue on Facebook is the fact that people can tag you in on pictures they post without your approval. Therefore, your profile can be open to risk of unprofessional exposure. It is very important to monitor your Facebook on a daily basis for photos that may not align you as a business professional. All it can take to turn a potential business contact away is an unprofessional photo that you may not even be aware of.

Facebook has a number of privacy settings that can help you keep things separated. For example you can create a number of different friend lists so that you can have one group for friends, one for family and one for business contacts. This allows you to set up privacy settings for each group. For example, you may want to share photos of your family vacation with your friends and family contacts, but not your professional contacts. There are also settings on Facebook that allow you to remove yourself from public search results. This will help keep your personal information separate from your professional information. It also may be helpful to remove yourself from Google. This can also be done by going to your personal settings page.

There are also settings on Twitter that can help keep your postings private so that only people that you approve of can see them. It is important to understand that once you change this setting it will make any new postings private, but postings made before you changed the setting will still be public.

Doing a little research and taking the time to learn how to safeguard your personal information is a good idea on many levels. It will also help you to separate the information that you want to share with your family and friends from that which you want to share with your professional contacts. These things will help you to keep a professional rapport with your professional contacts while still sharing photos of your vacations with your family and friends. This will help you keep things professional with your professional contacts and they will not be distracted by personal information. Social media sites can be a great benefit to your business if you just take a few precautions.

How to Build a Solid Link Strategy

Building a link strategy that will work can take a bit of time and research. Linking is one of the most important parts of a successful internet marketing campaign. It is important to understand how to build links that will be useful to your business and not just be a waste of your time. There are a few things to look at before you start building random links to your website. You want to make sure that the time you are investing in building links is time well spent. If you decide to outsource your link building, these steps are also important to complete before you hand off this task.

Finding the Right Keywords

One of the most important tools for choosing keywords is the Google keyword tool. It is important to vary the keywords that you are using to build links to your website. This Google tool can help you find a number of quality keywords that you may not have even considered which will help you build a solid foundation for your link building strategy. You do not want to create hundreds of links for your main keyword, only. You want to vary the keywords which will build a more natural looking network of links pointing to your website. It is also important to consider long tail keywords when you are building links. These are more like key terms that people would associate with your products or services. In many cases you will find that you will rank quickly for these types of links since they tend to be more specific. While long tail keywords may not carry the search volume that a main keyword can, they are important to incorporate into your linking techniques.

Using Yahoo to Find Great Places to Post Links

Finding the best places to post links to your site can seem like a completely overwhelming task. The best place to look for clues on where to post links is right at your top competitors. In many cases they can provide you with a plethora of information that can help you gain the right exposure for your company. Everyone knows the saying “Don’t reinvent the wheel” which basically means if someone has already come up with an idea that works there really isn’t a need to start the process over from scratch. You can easily find out what sites your competitors are using to build links from by going to Yahoo. All you need to do is type the following into the Yahoo search bar and you will have tons of helpful information right at your fingertips: linkdomain:www.mycompetitorwebsite.com. This will give you an up-to-date list of which sites are linking to your competitors, so you can go after the same links.

Vary Where Your Links Point

The next important thing to do when building links to your website is to vary where you are pointing your links to. You do not want to point every link you post to your homepage. You want to make sure that you are mixing things up and pointing links to different pages on your website. This is as important to your link building strategy as picking the right keywords. If you keep these three tips in mind when you start building links you will have a solid foundation that will be very beneficial to your business which will help you make the most out of the time and money you are spending on your link building strategy.

Using Facebook to Grow Your Business

Started as a way for its founder Mark Zucherburg to connect with friends at Harvard, Facebook has exploded to over 200 million users and growing each day. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family and even reconnect with old friends from years past, but it also can be a great tool for your business. Facebook makes it easy to share information with tons of people, all at once, all you need to do is update your Facebook page and bam, everyone you know now knows the latest news about you, your family and your business.

Just remember, if you are going to be using your Facebook page for professional purposes it is important to keep things professional. While, the more contacts you have the more exposure you may get for your business, you want to make sure that the exposure you are getting is positive. If you just go and add every person you may have rubbed shoulders with to your account you may be risking your page to some unprofessional exposure. So, it is important to be selective when you are inviting people into your professional network.

That being said, social media marketing is a great way to share information about your business with tons of people in an instantaneous way. Say you want to promote a sale for your business or promote a new product you just added to your site. You can just make a quick posting on your Facebook “wall” and you have just updated all of your contacts with the latest and greatest news about your company. As you build contacts from people you know you are sure to create new connections in the process. Those new connections can then give you additional exposure which will allow you to build your network with people you may not have even known a day ago.

People are always looking for ways to make their business or job easier and more effective. By posting information that can be useful to the masses you are building credibility for yourself as a business owner and an expert in your field. By sharing business tips, along with information about your specific products, you can build a strong following that can quickly expand your network and build exposure for your company. Say you have a great tip about organizing your emails. You can post the tip on your Facebook status box. This will let everyone that has followed you see the tip and see that you are willing to share helpful information with them. This will build a sense of trust and confidence in you which will translate to a sense of trust in your business.

Facebook is a great tool to help promote your business and build your brand. Sharing helpful business tips can build trust with followers which will translate into a larger network than you can imagine. Just make sure and keep things professional if you are using your Facebook for business purposes, otherwise, your exposure could quickly switch from professional to unprofessional and that can be hard to change back.

A Well Written Article Can Increase Web Traffic

As a busy entrepreneur in ecommerce, there are so many things to be tackled!  There’s building relationships with vendors, webmasters and clients.  There’s the task of hiring employees to provide customer support.  There’s getting a product up and running and maintaining inventory control or coordinating drop shipping.  The list goes on and on.  But here’s the thing; nothing happens without web traffic.

So priority #1 is finding the best and most efficient way to create and increase web traffic.  How to do it?  Easy.  Write compelling articles for online submissions.  This is how you drive traffic to your site.  Writing articles and publishing those articles online creates a face for your site.  This is where you sell yourself.  Demonstrate your knowledge of your industry, product or service, and you will be viewed as an expert.  Be viewed as an expert and you will be trusted.  People do business with People they trust.

Knowing that you have most likely spent a great deal of time preparing your ecommerce site for business, I’m guessing you probably have the best content throughout its pages.  While you get an “E” for Effort here, to really win big you’ve got to make sure that the public sees that content.  Without that, there are no sales.  Well written articles produced by our team contain prime SEO content coupled with a few backlinks to your site.  Backlinks are the very life of an ecommerce site, as they carry web traffic like your veins carry blood.

There’s another reason why links are important; they make your site more popular.  The most popular sites are the ones who show up first when a consumer performs a google search.  So, you could pay loads of money and spend hours upon hours managing pay per click campaigns; or you could incorporate a great article writing campaign as part of your internet marketing strategy and see higher rankings and increase web traffic organically.

In order for articles to benefit you, they need to be placed on sites that get attention.  There are many, and our team knows which to use and which to pass by.  Because online directories for article submissions all have varying requirements, we take the pressure off of the business owner by taking on the time consuming task of writing, linking, and article submissions with a great amount of creativity and professionalism.

The articles we write are optimized for readers and for search engines. That means we research the topics we write about, assess the personality of the company issuing the article, and do some digging to find out about topics readers find interesting. We blend all components together in order to gain the benefits of ranking for the article, which will gain visibility.  A visible article with an informative voice and links to your site WILL generate web traffic.   I want to restate the principle mentioned above.  People do business with people they know.  Through online article submissions, you can become that person everyone knows.  Let us take care of the busy work while you carry on the important task of operating a booming business.

Increase Conversion using Video Marketing

You’ve taken the necessary steps to create an ecommerce business.  You’ve chosen the product or service that will sell, and now you just need to get the word out to consumers that you have what they need.  This is where internet video marketing comes in.  Most of the highly successful websites use marketing techniques with videos, and judging from their success, I’d say these videos are doing their job.

So it comes down to this.  You know online video marketing can catapult your business to new heights.  With all the buzz out there about marketing with videos, many sites are already well on their way to increasing traffic and conversion.  Don’t be left behind due to lack of information, or lack of direction.  Devise your strategy for incorporating internet marketing videos into your business now.

Marketing with video seems to be fairly simple; except for the getting started part.  Obtaining the right set up can take time.  There’s the studio, if you even have space for one.  Then there’s set design of that studio, or buying a green screen on which to film.  Oh, remember the camera!  Once the studio set up is complete, then it’s time to write compelling script for your internet marketing videos.  Script is important, so make it good!  And then you’ve got to be camera-ready.  It’s time to try out your acting chops.

Ready for the good news?  You don’t have to resign yourself to doing all of this on your own.  Marketing with video is something that you can actually get started on right away, without all that prep work.  With Start Ranking Now, marketing video production can be a task that you simply delegate.  The benefit of handing over your important online video marketing work to us is twofold.  First, you don’t have to invest into a studio and spend countless hours perfecting lighting, scripts and so on.  Second, giving this task up to a professional company frees you up to do what you do best – run your company!

We are in the business of making floundering websites successful.  That is why we have gathered the finest experts in the area of video marketing and brought them on board.  Our professional staff can help you with everything from the simplest of task to taking on an entire project.  We can create Slideshows for the Home Page, an enticing script to help you get started with your own video for marketing, or an entire demo of your product.  All you have to do is send us the products you would like to showcase and leave the rest in our very capable hands.

The benefits are clear.  And now you can see that you have a way to effectively increase conversion.  With just a little information from you coupled with the creativity of our video marketing staff, marketing with video will be the next step to increasing conversion on your site.