When I discuss online marketing, you’ll often hear me mention your “marketing arsenal.” There is no one thing to do, one thing to buy, one thing to set up that can be considered your sole marketing effort that allows you to sit back and watch the dollars roll in as many would like to believe. Online marketing requires ongoing effort, testing, activities, participation — for perpetuity. This is the nature of the online beast.
Your marketing arsenal includes a plethora of activities, from SEO, SEM, to PPC, Blogging, Networking, eZines, Article Writing, Social Networking, ad buys and the list goes on. This is interactive technology after all and the more you interact; the better you will do.
What many overlook is how advertising off-line can be an extremely effective way to drive traffic to your site. Of course your domain, ad text and ad placement and design can all affect how many will remember your ad and go to your site. When done properly, you will see a spike in your site’s traffic and you’d better be ready to convert those visitors!
I read an interesting study on the value of off-line advertising driving visitors to Web sites and thought I would share that with you today.
Print Newspaper Ads Drive Online Research, In-Store Purchases
So with all you do online; at the end of the day don’t forget about all the off-line venues that can help to expose new customers to your site!
At your service,
Judith
The best scenario is to have inbound one-way links to your site. Those type of links show that you have something that another site found of value to link to you without having to agree to exchange links.
Exchanging links is a good thing, but only if it makes sense for both sites. Certainly competitors won’t want to exchange links. Nor would those who have a gift basket site want to link to an industrial components site. Two different markets there. Many think link exchanges are the end-all-be all to getting high search engine rankings. Not the case. Link exchanges pretty much cancel each other out and have no effect.
In addition, you need to make sure that you are linking to a credible site that is of a quality that earns your recommendation. See, when linking to a site you are basically giving a recommendation to your site visitors about the site you are linking to. Forget about linking to your best friend’s poorly developed site. This is business and you are judged by the company and the links you keep.
Be very leery of linking circles, link farms and pretty much anything that makes it sound like getting a bunch-o-links very quickly is a good thing. It isn’t. When sites participate in such programs including buying links, those links are ignored or in some cases penalized. The search engines are wise to most practices of artificially gaining links specifically to affect search engine rankings and they don’t look rank highly sites that use them.
So we’re back to square one. Create a valuable content rich site worth linking to and the links will happen. I have an article about the Reality of Linking, why not check it out?
At your service,
Judith
Each week I get literally hundreds of e-mails from concerned Netizens about how to handle those they care about (or those who simply don’t care) in regard to issues involving E-mail Etiquette and proper technology use. 30% of those e-mails pertain to business related issues!
What has become clear in my decade long journey of championing this topic is that most folks don’t know what is right, what the guidelines are or how they are being perceived by virtue of how they choose to use e-mail. Online, just as in the off-line world, is not an “anything goes” environment and there are repercussions based on your actions, the words you choose and how you use technology. In business, lack of E-mail Etiquette is called lost opportunity!
I’ve launched a new project today to help get the word out about proper technology use and E-mail Etiquette specifically. It’s called The E-mail Etiquette Revolution!
The concept is simple. Everyone posts the Revolution’s logo on their sites and Blogs and links back to the Revolution site. Visitors Take the Pledge to use technology as a way to learn, grow and thrive; not as an excuse to be lazy or not use the education we received in grade school.
We use the viral nature of the Web to work together to get the word out about this very important topic. Are you up to the challenge? Won’t you join me?
Take The Pledge today then Grab a Logo and let’s start a Revolution!
