Internet Marketing 24-7: Social Media Promotion

Internet Marketing 24-7: Social Media Promotion: Promoting your content with social media Social media can be a great way to let the world know that your content is out there, and ...

The Integrated Online Marketing Plan

Integrated Online Marketing Plan

When you start structuring your integrated marketing plan there are three parts that we want to keep in mind. Number one, we want to introduce content ahead of the trend. Ahead of the trend simply means doing your keyword research and determining when your key phrases are more likely to be search on.

If you want to be found in the search engines you have to have content on your site before the trend. Being ahead of the trend is usually 45 to 60 days before the trend peaks. The main reason is that is going to give you time to develop the content, create conversations on social media which will in turn create links from other website to your website. As you gain links and gain attention to that article on your site, it will increase the effectiveness and the relevancy of that article.

Integrated Marketing Plan | SEO Integrated Marketing

This will increase the possibility of it being found during the high search trend periods. Once that trend is in place and at the highest search period where people are looking for information, your ability to have conversation with people through multiple channels increases dramatically.  Once the trend is over you can use the information that you have learned and plan for either the next trend or for the next year.

Structuring your plan around the concept of introducing prior to the trend, developing during the trend and closing the trend helps you to be seen as an authority in your market because you know when to talk about important issues.

Its probably easiest to organize by the plan by months. This is typically where a spreadsheet with the next twelve months will work just fine. Next go over to  Google trends to find out when your keywords or key terms trend throughout the year.

If we use vacation and travel as our key phrases you can get a sense of when certain terms are trending. If you do a lookup in Google trends you can see that in January family vacations and beach vacations are at their highest search trend.  Write that on the  content calendar.  Inclusive vacations peaks in January.  Memorial Day vacations peaks in May and beach vacations has a second peak in June and July.

Now introduce the content that will reference these key phrases. You want to be online before the search trend hits so that you can build attention and gain links to your site. So  if you want to start ranking for articles about family vacations and beach vacations then you need to have content up on your site around mid November.

You can introduce the new content through a guest article, ask another blogger to guest blog your site. Maybe it's a article with a video that you can produce. If family vacations is what you are going after then videos are a great way to engage people as they're starting to research what type of vacation they want.  

You can publish the video on Youtube and of course embed the same video on your facebook page. Surround the video with content and possible asking people what type of vacation they are planning on for next year. You can see that we are introducing the content before the trend and then using it to leverage conversation up to the trend. Again, when you start introducing content, think about 45 to 60 days prior to the trend.

Remember, the trend goals are to get the search engines to index your content before the peak of your keyword trend.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Web Designer … Blurring the lines

Web Designer

… Blurring the lines

Web design has become a blended field.  It use to be, all you really needed to know was a little bit of HTML, how to create a link, maybe how to place an image on a page. If you picked up a program like Dreamweaver or GoLive, you were generally all set. Well, we face a much different landscape today. One in which there are so many processes and technologies involved, that it's not uncommon for web designers to specialize in a specific area or even in a specific technology.

Web Designer | The Blurred Lines 

Let’s share some of those specializations so that you can have a better idea of some of the areas and a clearer picture of the amount of diversity involved in the field of web design. 

The Generalist:
A generalist is a designer that is strong in the core skills of web design, and is relatively well practiced in the entire process of creating sites. From planning and prototyping, all the way through building and testing. This is the individual that can build an entire site from scratch, usually without the help of others.

If specific challenges arise outside their area of expertise, they usually bring in another specialist or challenge themselves to add another skill.

Visual designers:

 These are designers that are primarily concerned with the visual design of sites and interfaces. Color, layout, topography and graphics are their typical area of focus. These tend to be individuals with strong design skills, and are often graphic designers who are transitioning towards web design. Visual designers typically have strong HTML and CSS skills, as well as skills in graphic design.

UX Designer:

UX stands for user experience. The label UX Designer has been overused a little bit in terms of web design. UX signifies the focus on the user experience. Meaning the designer attempts to create sites in applications that through their design foster the desired experience for the user. If you use that broad of a definition however, isn't almost every designer a UX Designer? I mean, aren't we all concerned with the experience of our users. So let’s clarify, a UX Designer isn't a visual designer that's decided just to use that term. A true UX Designer is someone who has studied human behavior and tendencies and then designs in accordance with them. Often a UX Designers have no web skills at all and are used as consultants to help sites create a user-focused experience.Regardless, make sure that you really understand what UX Design means.

Interactive designers:

They focus on building interfaces that create seamless interactions between users and sites. They're closely aligned with UX Designers, but they tend to be more focused on behavioral technologies like JavaScript. JavaScript allows them to modify static HTML interfaces into immersive interactive experiences.

Motion graphic designers:

Motion graphic designers focus on animation. In many cases these are traditional animators that have moved to the web as a means of distribution or are now working on web projects that require animation. These could also be web designers that are interested in animated content or designers that work in game development. Although Flash is still used for animation and games on the web, motion graphic designers are increasingly using JavaScript and HTML5 technologies.

Front end developer:

A front end developer is a designer that focuses more on the functionality of sites through client side scripting. The rise of JavaScript and powerful JavaScript libraries has led to an explosion of development that moves the processing of scripting from the server to being performed directly in the browser. This has led to a blurring of the lines between designers and developers. In the past, most designers would hire developers to control site logic and behavior through server side scripting. Now, much of that functionality can be performed through the use of JavaScript.

CMS specialist:

CMSs, like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress allow designers to rapidly build sites with powerful functionality. Many designers have decided to specialize in a specific CMS platform. Some specialize in building WordPress themes or extensions, while others might specialize in the development of Drupal or Joomla sites.

Very few web designers specialize in just one area. Most web designers start out with a specific skill set or focus and then over the course of their careers pick up new skills or blend in new specializations as they arise.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Content performance

How do we measure our SEO content performance and relate them back to our business goals. Measuring the performance of your content is essential to determining the success of your SEO efforts. Measuring reporting and tweaking your SEO effects will enable you to plan your future content strategies. By looking at how your content performs, you'll be able to understand what your visitors want, and provide more of it to them in the future.

These questions are important to improving your content and SEO strategy:

-- What content are our visitors viewing?
-- What is garnering the most views?
-- Are our visitors engaged with our content?
-- Are our visitors sharing our content with others?
-- Is our content generating quality business results?

Content performance | Measuring your contents performance

If you haven't already, you can install a free tool, like Google Analytics, to collect data that you'll need to help you get the answers to these questions.

First, figuring out what our customers are looking at can be measured by simple page views. In Google Analytics, you can head over to the Content reports, and you'll see a list of the most popular pages of your website for the date range you're looking at. If you want to find out which were your most popular pages as Landing Pages, or the first page a visitor sees when they come to your site, you can head over to the Landing Pages report. 

If you're an advanced user, you can even use Custom Segments to look at only visits that came from organic search, or even specific search engines. While it's good to know which pieces of content got the most page views, that doesn't tell us anything about how well the content was received? Writing content is easy, but writing content that will provide value and leave an impression on your visitors is much more difficult, and that's what we're interested. We want to find out about visitor engagement.

There are three metrics that can help you quickly tell how well visitors are engaging with your content: pages per visit, average time on site, and bounce rate.

Visitors are considered more engaged the longer each of the stay on your web page. This can be measured by both average time on site, and the number of pages they view during their visit.

The bounce rate is a measure of how often a visitor lands on your website and then leaves without seeing any other page of the site. Generally speaking, the lower the bounce rate, the more your visitors were enticed by your content to dive deeper into your site.

Next, let's look at whether or not our content is being shared online.

You can use a slew of social media tools to measure how often your tweets and posts and pluses and shares are re- shared throughout your social networks, tools like Google Analytics can also be configured to track interactions that are happening both on and off your site. Google Analytics can track how many times people are clicking your social media sharing buttons, or leaving comments on your blog, and it can even go out and find the public posts across a number of different social networks that have been used to share content from your site.

You can use campaign tagging and Google Analytics Traffic Sources reports to see how many of your visits are coming from all of the sharing. Perhaps the most important question of all is whether or not all of this content production is driving our business goals. A properly configured web analytics tool is focused not just on counting pages, but associating all of that data with business outcomes. Do the visitors who came to our site as a result of particular piece of content end up buying something? Calling us? Did they submit a lead form or download a white paper? Did they sign-up for a product demonstration? Did they follow us on a social network, or did they share our content with others? Did they sign up for our newsletter? Each and every one of these goals has a real business value.

By understanding what content drives these conversion actions, we can answer the biggest question of all: What did we get back for our investment in SEO? Whether you use Google Analytics or any other analytics tool, monitoring and measuring the performance of your content will help you understand the value you're creating and help you plan for and continually improve the content you'll be focusing on next.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330

Internet Marketing 24-7: Optimizing non-text components

Internet Marketing 24-7: Optimizing non-text components: Optimizing non-text components of a web page Search engines are generally very good at analyzing and understanding the text content...