What's All The Fuss About Websites? They Mean Nothing!

Websites mean nothing if they don't have plenty of current, relevant and informative content! Content Is King When It Comes To Inbound Marketing

“Content is King” ... really? Now, haven’t we heard this line umpteen times before? Well, the truth is that while marketers have heard it time and time again, not many of them have really paid serious attention to it ... at least until now! That’s because ‘Inbound Marketing’ is “IN” – the new mantra that is making all serious internet marketers sit up and take notice. In short, it’s the advent of a brand new era in online marketing that combines social media vehicles with great content to drive more website traffic.

What’s Inbound Marketing?

In essence, inbound marketing is a proven strategic technique used by professional internet marketers with one core objective in mind ... to build SOLID and LASTING relationships with their customers. It is a strategy primarily designed to attract “real” customers to a business rather than the (expensive, often futile) traditional outbound marketing techniques (TV, print, radio) that many marketers still use to search for “potential” customers.

How’s Inbound Marketing Different?

The glaring difference between outbound and inbound marketing techniques is that while the former adopts a usually hard-sell “blah”, “blah”, “buy”, “buy”, “goodbye” strategy, the latter involves a softer, more honest, human, and persuasive approach to win customers and keep them happily there. However, you must know that no inbound marketing program can drive more website traffic or achieve targeted marketing objectives WITHOUT the use of believable, informative, persuasive and reliable content ... the very factors that prove, without a doubt, WHY content is king.

Does Good Content Make a Difference?

Well, you needn’t think twice ... ask any internet marketing consultant and he or she will tell you that good content is the soul of every successful website, and the single-most important factor responsible for driving more website traffic.

However, there are 3 critical components that can and will contribute to the success of your inbound marketing campaign • Content (relevant and updated regularly) • Search Engine Optimization • Reputable, Social Media vehicles.

1. The ‘Power’ of Content: Never loose sight of the fact that serious customers continuously look for information that’s useful, believable and reliable, and are usually turned off by ads that confuse and bore, rather than entertain and convince. Thanks to the cutting edge, online tools and techniques available today, content can be made far more interactive and persuasive than it has ever been. When combined with helpful tips, informative blogs and videos, and an overall attention-grabbing web design, content can indeed drive far more website traffic and deliver optimum punch to your inbound marketing campaign.
2. The ‘Punch’ of SEO: Content may be king, but this “king” will have a short-lived reign if it isn’t search engine optimized. SEO content delivers major benefits. It can build inbound links to your website (that’s more website traffic); keep visitors longer on your site; and above all, help maximize your site’s ranking on top search engines. What’s more, SEO content has proved to ignite the buying process because of its ability to create maximum awareness for your business, product, service or website among potential targets.
3. The ‘Reach’ of Social Media: If visitors have found your site’s content to be captivating, useful, and informative ... that’s half the inbound marketing battle won. That’s because visitors inevitably tend to share their experience with family, co-workers and friends. As a result, what may start out as a “trickle” of visitors to your site, could soon turn into a “flood” ... and that’s a great start to driving more website traffic. Once your web content gains more authenticity, clarity and credibility, it will most likely be carried by several social networks ... that’s even more website traffic ... for free!

If you need help in any or all of the above areas, hire the services of a professional internet marketing consultant A professional internet marketing consultant can be a valuable asset for building your online business by helping you develop cost-effective, strategies; providing you with hands-on practical SEO training; helping you develop credible content; assisting you in building back-links to your site; providing you with technical advice, and more.

Keep in mind, the focal point of all successful inbound marketing campaigns ... is content. So, give content all you’ve got, and you’ll know just why ... content is indeed king ... the undisputed ruler that reigns supreme on the World Wide Web today.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

If your company has a product or service to sell, the best way to reach your audience is by providing them with the right information. You can do this by creating an online business to reach your prospective and present customers. To be able to reach the customers effectively, you need to be on the top of the search engine lists. This can be done with the help of search engine optimization.

The foundation of SEO is relevant content. So the big question is, how much does SEO content cost? What price is fair to pay for optimized content for my my website? You can hire professional writers that will help you make your website worth visiting. If you do not have an in house team of content writers, you can outsource your work to freelancers that hold expertise in writing keyword rich content according to your business needs. Many writers specialize in writing SEO content and optimized content to meet your SEO objectives online.

When you hire writers to develop content for your website, there are various factors that you need to be careful of. A writer needs to have the knowledge in the area or the subject catering to your business. The industry should be well known to him or her and they should make the content rich so as to make it user centric. It is an important aspect so that you can reach the customers and other business clients in a compelling way.

The writers you hire have to be masters in their work and should offer content that is more than just information. If they are good enough, the readers of your website will like them and will want to come back to your site. You need to be careful about the way they write and the content they include in their work however.

The cost of content varies from author to author and their level of expertise. An average price for SEO content ranges from USD 4 to USD 20 per page. The price can be a little higher if there are specific SEO instructions to be carried out. The content also depends upon the topic that you are writing on. Some companies may want more content while other companies may want content that gives the basic outlines. One should write the content according to the target audience. Visitors do not read cluttered pages and they want specific information that will answer their questions.

When you hire writers for your SEO content, you should leverage their potential to get the most value for your money. A good content writer will save your time and time is money. A skilled writer should know how to use the correct keywords so that SEO results can be obtained. Your freelance writer should help you gain credibility and offer help when you need it. Be smart and hire writers that are flexible want what's best for your company.

An inbound internet marketing consultant can help you determine who you can trust and who is qualified to write copy for your website.

How Much Does An Inbound Linking Campaign Cost?

A good online marketing plan can aid a company in its efforts to gain new customers. To achieve this, a company must begin by building a solid web presence.

A website is the online persona of a business. The work associated with a site, essentially is to represent a company, attract visitors, and generate leads. A big driver in attracting visitors is getting found in the search engines. This will attract new visitors but a successful website will also attract repeat visitors. Inbound links are critical in accomplishing both these things.

The first task, which business owners new to SEO inbound internet marketing should do is to make sure that they possess an effective and a well-organized website. Owning a site offers numerous benefits particularly for small and medium size businesses. This means that through a website the businesses will be able to offer information and market their products 24x7 via online newsletters, brochures and news pages.

An additional popular and inexpensive method of internet marketing is through inbound linking. Through inbound linking, you launch campaign to avail one-way inbound link from various other sites to your site. The most fruitful methods include inbound linking from pages with superior search engine page rank and pages with appropriate topic and theme and content pages instead of link pages. So how much does an inbound linking SEO campaign cost? An average cost per link is about $25. If a company is offering a much lower price then I would be very cautious. How much does article marketing cost? A good quality article marketing campaign can run about $70 per article.

Being an online business owner, one should make sure that the site created and the inbound link is searched engine optimized. Search engines offer loads of credit to the SEO inbound links. Making link popularity assists your site in getting noticed more easily and more often. These inbound links assist your pages to achieve higher search engine rankings. When it comes to major search engine like Google, it greatly relies on inbound links and offers you superior ranking for quality links your webpage.

For a good Google PageRank, quality inbound links and link popularity of your website is more essential than on site optimization, such as meta tags, meta descriptions or H1 tags. Obtaining good quality inbound links will automatically raise the ranking of your page. The total links you attain also plays a vital role in getting good Google page ranking.

Article marketing, email marketing and blogging

Article marketing, email marketing and blogging can be the most inexpensive yet most effective marketing tactic to attain higher rankings. Article marketing and blogging demand extra time and effort, but can be the best approach to earn respect and communicate among potential customers.

One can write article and blogs on their own or can hire the services of ghostwriters. The main benefit of hiring professional writers is that they will generate professional articles and blogs for your site along with keeping in mind the art SEO. Make sure to include links to your site throughout each blog or article so that the potential clients could visit your website. Maintaining a site requires loads of efforts and some laziness could dramatically drop the ranking of your page. Be sure to update your blog regularly and create new articles for your website so you can attract inbound links.

At present, with the growing competition in the Internet world, it is imperative for businesses to have a substantial online presence by getting considerable inbound links and remain one step ahead from their competitors. Inbound internet marketing is the best way to generate free leads to your sales force...find an inbound online marketing consultant and get the training you need to implement a successful campaign.

Google vs Facebook vs Twitter...Winner take All?

There's a major shift taking place on the internet and the average Joe (or Joanne) has no idea what's taking place. The ironic thing is though, the shift involves the average person's most valuable online assets...their identity, personal information, habits, friends, preferences and more.

They go about their daily lives casually adding this information to their Facebook profile, tweeting it to the world on Twitter, telling everyone what they're working on via LinkedIn or sharing what's on their mind in Facebook but trust me...these companies are not taking all this personal data "casually"! This information is GOLD...gold in the hands of the company that controls the information. Why? Behavioral targeting has huge potential...with all this data, these companies can deliver extremely targeted advertising.

Another gold mine lies in the searchable data these companies are collecting. There is a ton data being collected on the servers of these companies Facebook alone estimates that users share 4 billion pieces of information a month. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. So why does this all matter? Well, these companies are now starting to allow most of this data to be searched and that means ads related to your searches can be served up just like Google AdSense/AdWords. The kicker is this, the difference between this searchable data and the searchable data Google provides is that it's coming from your network of friends and colleagues. If you want to ask what someone thought about their new iPhone, would you want to hear from some anonymous person found on Google or from one of your friends?

There's another thorn in Google's side, it's called "real-time" data. information provided on Twitter and Facebook is far more timely than what you can get on Google. Twitter is providing real-time information that is not only beating Google at it's own game but it's beating the leading news networks like CNN. The recent events in Iran allowed Twitter to shine against the news king CNN. Robert Scoble wrote a great piece on this point entitled "The Day Twitter Kicked CNN's Behind". Even Google's co-founder Larry Page admitted that Twitter has made an impact on their strategy regarding real-time search. "Larry Page: Twitter Made Google Focus On Real-Time Search".

We're starting to see Facebook Connect and Friend Connect (Google's answer to Facebook Connect) on thousands of other sites so that people can take their network of friends and personal data with them to these sites. there's a huge land grab going on here to host and control our personal user data...that's the holy grail of the new internet.

The lesson here is that the internet is is having a profound affect on the WAY we communicate, WHAT we communicate and WHO we communicate to. They've also provided a way for everything we communicate online to be stored, organized and accessed easily. It's hard to predict how all of this will affect our personal lives and businesses. As an inbound online marketing consultant I'm exposed to a lot of this on a daily basis, however, the average person is mostly unaware of what's at stake with all the personal data they casually share. It might be worth an individuals time to educate themselves a bit to what's going on and for businesses I think it's critical that they get educated on social media marketing, search engine optimization, inbound marketing strategies...the future of their business could be at stake.

Denver Inbound Marketing Consultant - Don't Hire this One

Attention, if you are looking for any of the following services please do not click on any links to my website!

Are you looking for...

• A company that doesn't do a thorough keyword research analysis, with you involved, before they do anything for your SEO or inbound marketing campaign.
  
• A company that will quote you Google search volume that is inflated due to the fact that they looked it up using the "broad" setting when they should really be using the "phrase' setting.
  
• A company that cannot quantify or describe exactly what they'll be doing for you with their SEO campaign.
• A company that will scare you into thinking you can never stop paying the monthly fees they're charging you or you'll fall off the edge of the earth in terms of rankings.
• A company that doesn't address the on-page SEO as part of the overall SEO campaign.
• A company that doesn't attempt to teach you about what they're doing to your website so that you can continue to make progress down the road on your own.
• A company that doesn't take a snapshot of where your rankings are at BEFORE they start your campaign and also provide detailed reports ongoing.
• A company that doesn't agree upon campaign expectations with you before they take your money.

if you're looking for any of these attributes in an Inbound Marketing or Search Engine Marketing company then don't attempt to contact an Inbound Online Marketing Consultant like myself.

Happy marketing!

Building A Solid Foundation with On-Page SEO

To reference a tried and true (if not over used) analogy…if you’re going to build a house you better have a good solid foundation. The same goes for implementing a solid SEO campaign. As I delineated in previous posts, there are 2 main components of SEO…”On-Page” and “Off-Page”. If you have not optimized your website properly then it’s going to be difficult to have an effective Off-Page campaign which in turn will make it difficult achieve your desired rankings. In affect, you're going to battle with your competitors with one arm tied behind your back.

When should you optimize your website? Well, the most optimal time would be when you’re first building your site. This would be the most efficient time because the coding and structure is being developed and that’s what On-Page optimization is all about…proper coding and proper structure. It’s the same logic as doing the plumbing and electrical work while a house is being built…true those things could be done afterwards but it’s not going to be nearly as efficient.

One thing I’ve noticed is that most web designers and developers offer some sort of SEO service. I have also noticed that, no offense to web designers and I know there are exceptions, most web designers know just enough about SEO to be dangerous. They’ve got some of the basics down but fall far short of optimizing a website to compete for competitive keywords.

I highly recommend having an advisor of some sort, or a company who specializes in SEO, evaluate the skills of your web designer or have them do the SEO themselves as the site is being built. There’s nothing wrong with having one company build your site and another do your SEO…much like a general contractor has a multitude of subcontractors doing various projects on the same house…this is smart in that you get people who are specialized in what they do and end up with a better end result.

What if you have an existing website? Most of you reading this are going to have an existing website and probably don’t know what, if any, optimization was done when you had your site built. What you need to do is have someone run an analysis on your site to determine what has been done and what still needs to be done. Even if the proper optimization was done in the beginning, it’s a good idea to have your site checked because you’ve probably been adding content and links etc. and that will have an affect (positive and negative) on the way the search engine crawlers perceive your site and rank you. I’ll discuss doing “On-Page” SEO on an existing website in my next post. Meanwhile, you can always call me.

Search Engine Optimization Overview

Over 60,000,000 Americans are conducting searches daily online, therefore, in order to obtain a competitive advantage it’s critical for every business to secure their position on the major search engines in order for their would be customers to find them. With 85% of all new visitors to a website originating from the major search engines, it’s obvious how important search engine rankings are but very few companies have the knowledge or the time to run an search engine marketing campaign that is going to give them the results they desire.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website. There are 2 components of the process, “On-Site” and “Off-Site” optimization. On-Site optimization deals with the coding of a website such as meta tags, internal linking structure, title tags, content development, content tagging, site mapping, URL formation and HTML code. Off-Site optimization deals with things like inbound linking, blog building, social bookmarking, directory submissions and strategic partnerships.

The following processes are critical for successful Search Engine Optimization:

• Identifying your services/products, market and competition.
• Keyword research in order to choose the keywords that best describe what products and/or services you provide.
• Conduct a keyword analysis to determine the highest value keywords possible. The “value analysis” takes into account volume, competition and likelihood of conversion.
• Analyze website and implement “On-Site” optimization.
• Conduct Off-Site optimization campaign.
• Monitoring your rankings progress.
• Results tracking through web analytics…ROI is the priority.

Lastly, any Search Engine Optimization activity must be done without breaking any search engine rules and regulations. “Black Hat” techniques such as “spamming” or “presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users” can get your website dropped completely.