Use Your Online Presence to Optimize Your Offline Popularity

The ever-present availability of the internet serves businesses in a lot of positive ways, but it’s easy to forget that offline events can benefit from the internet as well. With the right online promotion, you can boost attendance at your next offline event by double or even triple what you had at your last one. Here are a few tips for using the internet to leverage the popularity of any upcoming business events, whether they be conferences, seminars, tradeshows, or the like.

The first thing to do is get the audience prepared for the upcoming event. Facebook makes an excellent starting point as it allows you to schedule events in advance and spread the word through the social networks. Use your business page to set up the event, and then invite all your followers and contacts. Encourage them to share it with their friends, and with the right type of community involvement you can easily skyrocket the number of attendees. But don’t stop with Facebook alone. Announce the event on all of your business profiles, including Twitter, LinkedIn, even Youtube.

Post information to let your audience learn more about what will be happening at the event, and use that to increase the buzz surrounding it. It’s best to do this at least a few weeks in advance so everybody involved has a chance to reach out to their own communities and reach as many people as possible in the following days. If you can get people excited about what you’re doing online, more of them will show up on the day of the event.

As the event is taking place, set up a real time feed of news, pictures, and video to cater to the people who wanted to attend but couldn’t for some reason. One simple and effective way to do this is to stream every update through Twitter. You can even go so far as to create a unique hashtag that will allow people to quickly find your updates and share them with friends. It also gives you a useful metric for tracking the popularity of the event later on.

At this point, you can continue to use the popularity of that event to build even more buzz for future ones. The day after the event, post pictures or videos of what happened. By doing this you’ll be further connecting with everybody who was present, all those people who couldn’t make it, and anybody who might be interested in attending the next one. It’s a threefold benefit. Now take the time to archive all the media and post some reminders periodically to keep the idea of the excitement fresh in your audience’s minds.

Then, when you’re starting to prepare for the next big event, you won’t have to worry about building as much buzz because it’s already there waiting for you. The internet is phenomenal for promotion and networking. So many people forget about the online aspect when they’re planning an offline event, but it can be just as powerful (if not more so) than traditional offline promotion.

Tips to Help You Stay on Top of the Hottest Online Trends

The internet is changing every single day, and along with that change we see news and marketing trends coming and going faster than anything that could happen in the physical world. One of the biggest problems that newcomers to internet marketing face is simply sheer overload of information. If you try to keep track of every single change in your market or niche, you’ll go crazy. But how can you tell which trends are important and which ones aren’t?

Learn to Let Go

The first and most important lesson any online marketer can learn is that you can’t beat yourself up for missing some new important trend. It happens to everybody, and you have to be able to learn when to let go. It might be really difficult, especially in the beginning, but eventually you’ll learn how to cherry pick the information that is most relevant to you and let the rest of it slip on past. You don’t have to read every update that comes through your RSS subscriptions, you don’t need to sit on your Twitter news feed and check every single update; you don’t even have to reply to every email that comes into your inbox. And trust me, it’s going to be hard at first, but you don’t have to do it without help.

Fine Tune Your Alerts

Google has an awesome tool called Google Alerts that allows you to set specific alerts for news from blogs or websites that contains certain keywords. You can choose the keywords, and by doing so keep track of any information about you, your business, and hot topics that you deal with specifically on a day to day basis. Google Alerts will send emails directly to your inbox with all the notifications. You can set it to deliver in real time, once a day, or once a week. Once a day is usually the best option because real time can start to really clutter up your inbox.

The same sort of thing can be done with Twitter as well, with services like HootSuite or Tweetdeck. This lets you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on around you without the need to filter through all the background noise and false alarms. You can take a reactive approach to everything of concern that immediately interests you.

Skim for Stories

I know I just recommended not going through your whole Twitter news feed every day, but sometimes doing just that can help you out. The idea is not to spend too much time doing it. Every now and then, just skim down over all the tweets for the past few hours. Don’t read each one, but look for anything that jumps out at you. You never know what you might run into just by chance. Again, do this sparingly and don’t put too much stock in it. You won’t always find something useful, but you may just run across that one item that sparks a new idea.

What’s the Best Way to Measure Your Online Marketing Success?

There are a lot of differences between traditional print based marketing and the relatively new concept of online marketing. Some marketers say that most of the old techniques still apply to online marketing, while others are of the opinion that there is virtually no overlap between the two. Even with the differences being what they are, there’s still one important thing that hasn’t changed: You always have to measure your marketing campaign.

Introducing New Metrics

Surprisingly enough, most of the metrics used for measuring your marketing campaign’s success haven’t changed all the much. We’re just calling them something different now. Whereas in the past you may have a questionnaire in your store asking “How did you hear about us?,” Now you check a program like Google Analytics to see what their referring site was. It’s the same concept just put into a different context.

For the longest time, the final measure of the success of a marketing campaign was based around the sales leads. The more leads a particular method brought in, the more effective it was. Conversion was important too, but that rested more on the quality of the products, along with the price, than it did on the marketing aspect. Marketing brings people in, and it’s up to the store to close the sale.

As you do this online marketing thing for awhile, eventually you start to realize that things haven’t changed all that much. We just use different words. Let’s look at three specific types of online marketing and see how they’re measured.

Email Marketing

You send out an email to your subscriber list, and then measure the number of people who visit your website from a link in the email. This is called “Click-thru rate,” or CTR, which is a term we’ll use a lot. In the context of a marketing effort, the people who click through onto your website are the leads generated by that campaign.

Online Ads

Ads are placed around on websites much the same way you might put up a billboard in real life. In the real world, someone may see that billboard and then decide to visit your store. Online, the person would see the ad, click on it, and be redirected back to your website. It’s the exact same principle, it just happens much, much faster. Just as with email marketing, you measure the CTR of your various ads to see if they’re effective where they are, or if you should move them to different websites.

Search Engine Results

Somebody searches for a specific keyword and your website pops up in the results, along with nine others on the same page. If they click your website link, that counts as a referral from the search engine. You can track which search engines are bringing you traffic, as well as which keywords are bringing your page up in the results. When you start receiving a lot of traffic from a specific keyword, you know that campaign was successful

How Often Should You Publish On a Business Blog?

Setting up a blog is easy; keeping it updated is where the challenge comes in. But how often should you actually post? There have been a lot of independent trials done on this subject, mostly by individual bloggers, who were tracking their results, but the result was invariably the same: More is better. Let’s take a look at what that means, and why finding a balance is the best way to get your blog to the top.

The Research Is Conclusive

We just mentioned that a lot of the “facts” about blogging frequency are from various sources, but don’t let take that to mean that there haven’t been any official studies done on the subject. The State of Inbound Marketing 2011 report from Hubspot came to the conclusion that 57% of companies with a blog have managed to get at least one customer from a lead generated by that blog.

However, even more importantly there’s a direct relationship to the number of blogs posted and the number of customers acquired. Those who published more brought in more customers from their blog. The opposite is also true. When you take a laid back approach to your business blog, you won’t get anything moving. Customers respond to consistency, especially in the blogging world. Businesses that don’t keep their blog updated are seen, even if superficially, as unreliable and potentially untrustworthy.

So How Often Is Often Enough?

That same Hubspot report said that businesses that publish a new blog post at least twenty times each month get an average of five times as much traffic as those that publish less than four posts each month. What that means is that those once-weekly posts just aren’t cutting it.

And what about leads? Those businesses that are throwing out 20 or more blog posts each month are consistently reeling in four times as many leads as companies that don’t blog at all. Those are pretty solid numbers, so what’s holding you back from blogging more?

Realistically speaking, there can actually be a lot to keep you from getting more blog posts up, time being the main factor. Twenty posts each month is a lot of work, especially if you’re shooting for high quality, informative blog posts. A lot of businesses also look at blogging as a secondary priority to other business tasks, and we’re not saying that’s a bad thing. However, finding the time to sit down each month and write a few posts can end up paying off in terms of a 500% increase in website traffic.

Tips for Keeping Your Blog Organized

If you have trouble remembering to get those posts up (and a lot of us do), try to sit down at the beginning of the month and plan out which days you want to post. You can make it even easier on yourself by figuring out which topics to write about for each day. Them either set aside an hour for each posting day to write, or write all of the week’s posts at the beginning of the week and schedule them.

Three Simple Ways to Keep Your Blog Integrated With Your Website

As anyone will tell you, setting up a business blog is an important aspect of developing an online presence for small businesses. Blogs create a steady stream of traffic and fresh material for both search engines and human visitors alike, and with proper SEO techniques they can be a powerful way to boost a website”s PageRank.

However, simply putting up a blog under your company”s name doesn”t take you all the way. A lot of businesses these days hear about the importance of blogs and jump on the bandwagon without figuring out how to properly integrate the blog with their website, and as a result they lose out on a lot of the potential traffic that would usually come from those blogs. An example of this would be publishing your blog on an entirely separate domain from your main website. Some companies even try to cut budgeting corners and publish their blogs on one of the many free blogging platforms peppering the internet. Taking either of these routes is a crippling mistake that will put a damper on the effectiveness of your blog.

Aside from the obvious SEO complications, your brand itself will also suffer. When a customer or visitor on your website clicks on a link to go to your blog, most of the time they”ll expect to stay on the same domain. When that link takes them to a different domain, or worse, to wordpress.com or blogger.com, they might get confused because of the unexpected transition. If they land on a free blogging platform, they may even see your brand as unprofessional because you aren”t even willing to pay a few extra dollars a month to host slot machines your own content. There”s a lot to be said about the reliability of a site that hosts their own blog, even if it”s only a face value perception.

There are three simple ways that you can keep your blog integrated with your website to fully enjoy the benefits it has to offer.

Host Your Blog on a Sub Domain

The best place to put your blog is on a sub domain adjacent to your own site. For example, if your website is www.mysite.com, the blog sub domain would appear as www.blog.mysite.com. This keeps everybody in the same place, and allows you to perform off-site SEO for a single site as opposed to two.

Host Your Blog in a Website Folder

Alternatively, you could place the blog location in a folder on your website, with the end result appearing as www.mysite.com/blog. From the user”s perspective, this is identical to the effect created by a sub domain.

Use a Similar Domain

Finally, if you really want to set up a separate domain for your blog, it helps to keep the URL as similar as possible. Using the same example, this might look like www.mysiteblog.com. You will run into the problem of setting up viable SEO for both of these sites, but you get the added benefit of having two domains, which can be used to link with each other, thus increasing your backlink power.