We’ve decided to consolidate all of our Internet Marketing, SEO, Business and Social Media pages from The Moxie Maven, Moxie Mafia and from Kettlewell.net into one primary location at our new main site, located at Mox & Dom

We took The Moxie Maven and The Dominator, and combined them into “Mox & Dom” and has been serving us quite well from an image perspective, and our ability to bounce ideas off each other better, and combine our specialties gives our clients and audience a better picture of online marketing in one location.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be transferring the three blogs into Mox & Dom, but all the content that you’ve found valuable on this site, will eventually be located over there.

The only exception are personal opinions, blurbs, and fun things that I as a father, friend or funny-man have put up here, will remain here, and this will turn into my personal blog for me, about anything I want to rant about.

If you’ve never visited us at Mox & Dom, I highly recommend that you take a few minutes and check things out.

See you there.

Matt  aka ‘The Dominator’

They also allow for scheduled tweets, but the interface is a bit awkward at first. Once you know what’s going on, scheduled tweets are a Hoot! (ok, bad joke)

Take a peek at this video, it’s less than 2 minutes long, and easy to follow. (if not tell me, and I’ll redo it after I cry!)

I’m looking to leverage my marketing expertise with the expertise of those in a variety of industries to put together highly profitable membership sites that are valuable to the community at large.

What kinds of industries do I need?

Just about any, so long as you have information that is valuable enough that people will want to pay for it.  Examples include Programmers, Stock Traders, Insurance Agents, Realtors, Fortune Tellers, Fitness Trainers, Dietitians – and these are just a few of thousands of examples.  Any industry that can be leveraged to sell things to the public on a continual basis.  Don’t let this part throw you off, contact me, and let’s brainstorm.  90% of industries can be leveraged to make money on a continual basis.

Are there industries that you already have ideas for?

I do.  I’m actively looking for WordPress experts, Programming Experts (especially AJAX), and Financial Indicator Programmers (TradeStation, NinjaTrader, etc).  I have programs that I could have up and running in a weeks time for these programs.

What kind of money will we make?

Great question, and it all depends on how successfully we can work together.  The idea is that all profits will be equitably split 50/50 between the 2 of us, minus expenses like marketing, PPC and other advertising.  The idea is the have a subscriber base of over 300 members in a years time.  To put that into perspective, if we were to charge out $30/month that’s $9,000 or $4,500 each – per month! Some industries and concepts will allow for a higher priced monthly charge, say $100/month.  With 300 members, that’s $30,000 total, or $15,000 each – per month!

What kind of commitment is there?

Every site and concept will be a little bit different, but I would figure at least 20 hours per month, and maybe up to 40 hours per month.  So there is a commitment, but with the possibility of a large payout in the end.  Your commitment will consist of writing.  If writing scares you, then this won’t be the right opportunity for you, unless you can convince a friend to do your writing with your oversight.  Some programs might require daily intervention, others will only require weekly or monthly attention.  We can discuss specifics and put a quick plan together to see if it’s still something you want to pursue.

So what is my role in this whole thing?

My role is to handle all technical and marketing aspects of this joint venture.  This includes setting up the membership site, getting the site laid out professionally, hosting, graphics work, get video&audio feeds put together, and to market the site to assure that we gain the necessary exposure, including banner ads, print ads, PPC, social media, SEO, and other Internet marketing techniques.

Do you have an example membership site?

Our latest membership site is the Moxie Mafia Social Media Training System.  As you can see, it is very professional, informative, and inviting.  This is a great example of the kinds of sites that we’re aiming to have put together.

I’m interested, what do I need to do?

I’m glad you’re interested.  All you need to do is call me (Matt Kettlewell) on my cell phone at 970-261-2684 , or call the office at 970-985-4192 or use our contact form and I’ll call you back to discuss our opportunity.

You remember those days don’t you? You were searching for the Whitehouse homepage, and would land on a major porn site? Ahh the good ol days of when Internet technology was new.

I’ve recently been writing articles for Ezine Articles’ “Hundred Articles in 100 Days” contest, and am really getting into it. I get to stretch my mind, hone my cognitive abilities, and retrain some of my creative processes.

There’s also huge value to a website’s traffic through article marketing as well, and is considered by some to be the single most effective form of online marketing.

After I recently submitted an article,  a pop-up dialogue box told me that I used the same phrase too many times, and that I needed to write a better article. In this particular article, I wasn’t targeting a keyword.  Nope.  Just a good article about search engines, so the term “search engine” was used where needed.

Keyword stuffing is another term used for this, if it’s used in a bad way.  I thoroughly preach to all businesses to never, ever keyword stuff.  There’s no reason to, and search engines are known for degrading your rankings if they think you’re keyword stuffing.

I’ve been teaching myself over the years to use nouns instead of pronouns. To use more descriptive language that is easier for readers to comprehend, and make use of. I don’t always do it, but I try to write this way a majority of the time, partly because it does add some SEO value, but it also increases the readability of most of my articles.

So is it a problem that my articles had the term “search engine” in it too many times?  From Ezine Articles’ perception, yes.

Do I agree with Ezine Articles’ decision to block my article?  yes.  Why?

Because they have too many people that abuse their system with articles only for SEO purposes.  They are looking for quality content to add to their site.  This means that they have to set certain guidelines to filter out potential trash.  I respect this decision to filter.  It’s a protection mechanism that covers 90% of the bad articles from getting listed.

I want my articles to be side by side with good articles, so if my article gets flagged as being keyword stuffed, then it gives me a chance to reflect, improve my own writing, and make corrections.

But is it really a problem to have the term “search engine” in my article, if say I posted it on my own blog? Not at all, so long as it’s sole purpose is to convey your message to your readers.

What I’ve found is that by writing an article that is easy to read and understand, especially technical articles, that I need to use nouns a lot more often, and be slightly more descriptive, which will naturally lend certain terms to be used more often.   This leads to what I refer to as “Natural Keyword Saturation”, and I think is a good thing.

But if you’re after some contrived “keyword saturation” number, then you’re writing your articles and content for the wrong reason.  The primary reason that you need to be writing articles and pages is for your readers and visitors.  They are the ones that will get the satisfaction of the words that you write, and will return day after day to listen to your wisdom.

So take the time to write some good articles, put them on your blog, and don’t worry about keyword saturation.  Just let the keywords saturate themselves “naturally”.

This time, the issue is a little bit more serious… according to Twitters original status updates, all they could say was : “Site is Down”.  They later went on to update us that they were in the midst of a DOS attack.

FaceBook experienced delays, a short outage, and links not working.  There are reports that FaceBook is looking into this problem, which in itself probably means that they know something’s going on, but they aren’t addressing it publicly yet.  Time will tell.

LiveJournal reportedly also had some downtime as well this morning.

I found a link at one point this morning that indicated that there was a link with Verio or Amazon Web Services that was the problem, and would be effecting several social media sites.  I couldn’t confirm this link, because it was posted in FaceBook, and FaceBook was having an issue with internal links at the time.. go figure!

As of right now (9:45 MST) Twitter is back up, and appears to have recovered from this DOS attack… for now.  FaceBook is allowing me to update status, and check out links… maybe I’ll go find that Verio link that didn’t work before.

EDIT: (9:47 MST  – 2 minutes later) Twitter is having more problems… I suspect that the worst is over, but just remember that there really is more to life than online social media… even for an online addict like myself.

EDIT: (9:52 MST) FaceBook is down… I’m seriously thinking there is a link.  Good luck to all of their IT staff… it’s gonna be a really long day for them.

I’ve been reading about the merger, and it seems that there are both good and bad things about the Microsoft and Yahoo merger.

Randfish of SEOmoz gave a nice summary of the top 10 things that might change with the Microsoft and Yahoo Search Engine merger, and gave some nice insight into things that could change.

I hadn’t even considered that Yahoo Site Explorer could go away, which right now is the best source of back link information, through the linkdomain search query operator.

There are some, as noted in this SearchEngineWatch article on the merger reaction, that seem to think this will be a good thing for advertisers and marketers.

I personally think that is a wee bit too early to decide for sure what this means, but I do think that with only 2 major players at the table, there will be more and more reason to SEO a site for both of them, instead of just relying on optimizing for Google.

What does this mean for SEO cost?  it might cost more to get organic results if you push to have both search engines return your site in top search engine rankings, but I think that overall PPC costs will go down on a “per click” basis, but having to manage two separate accounts, instead of just an AdWords PPC campaign will cost more to manage.

Less is more… or so I read in a Unix book at one time.

I do think that with only two big search engines, instead of one big one, and two little ones, that we might see some neck-to-neck competition.

Just like the good ole beginning days of AMD and Intel, duking it out to to see who would be the first to 1Ghz… or who could pipeline more data simultaneously.

Personally, I think that it will be a humbling experience for Google, and they will be forced to do a little bit more, and raise the benchmarks for superiority a little bit higher.  But I’m sure that Yahoo and Microsoft are well aware of this, and will be ready to charge forward with their own ideas of what it will take to dominate the search engine marketing space.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited to see what the future of search engines has in store for us in the near future.

The problem that most businesses have is the growing big part… and the building a reputation part.

There are two primary parts to reputation: Quality and Quantity.

Quality addresses what you say and how you say it.  Do you finesse your words, or do you prefer to say it like it is?  No matter how you say it, you’re setting up the quality of your message.

Quantity addresses where you say it, and who says it for you.  Do you write only on your blog, or do you write articles in magazines, and trade journals?  Do you write once a month, or once a day?

So if you can find a way to have a positive reputation with high quality and sufficient quantity, you’ll be building on your company’s reputation in no time.

Does a good reputation guarantee growth?  No.  But you have a better chance of growing if you do.

So if building a reputation is a matter of quality and quantity, is there a way to combine them?

I mean to really get the word out in lots of places and with high quality that customers would like to see?

Well, sure, there’s lots of ways to get your message out there, and to get build your reputation.  You can write articles every month and submit them to article directories.  That is one way, and has a reputation for being successful.

However, I’m proposing an entirely new system of building trust with your clients and reputation for your company.

Do you happen to remember the old web-rings?  They were fairly tacky, and unprofessional, but they did serve a purpose of promoting sites. It was common in several industries in the 90’s, but none of the professional industries that I can remember.

And, before I lose your trust in me, I’m not recommending that you join one a web-ring.

They were designed to band categories of web-pages together and have a link on everyone’s page that would point to the next website in the group.

I refer to this as the website on your right, since there was often an arrow pointing to the right indicating that it would take you to the next website in the web ring.

In today’s online world, link exchanges are still popular for linking sites to one another, but they are done mostly for search engine rankings, and doesn’t help promote your reputation.

There’s also the idea of asking someone to write a review of your service or product, but tends to be limited in scope and doesn’t portray your business to it’s fullest.

So how else can we build our reputations quality and quantity, in pursuit of establishing business growth?

Well, here’s the idea that we’re putting together….

We’re pulling together several of our local social media experts (4-5 is about right), and we’re asking a common question that we all have to answer on our blogs.

This can be as simple as “What’s your favorite online social networking tool” or it can be more restrictive, like “What single online social media tool do you use to promote your business, and why”.

The kicker here is that each of us will link to each other’s blog post that is answering the same question, but giving a potentially different view or opinion.  This is a great advantage to your readers that want to get a different perspective or insight into specific topics.

Not only will this build your reputation, it will build the reputation of those that you banded together to power post with.

From an SEO and SEM perspective, each author gets extra exposure from shared readership and an increase in backlinks, which can only help in search engine rankings.

Set a schedule to do this every week, and you will get to complete the reputation cycle by combining quality with quantity.

Over time this enhanced reputation will build trust, and eventually growth in your business.

Because of the efficiency and effectiveness of this idea, and it’s Win-Win strategy for everyone, I’m honestly surprised that it’s not implemented more often.

You can bet that Kettlewell Enterprises is going to be utilizing this mechanism a lot in the near future.

Go ahead and try power posting in your industry, and let us know how it works for you.

But today my dear friends, I’m not going to tell you much.  Nope.

I want to ask you some questions.

I really want to know ‘what is holding you back in your online marketing successes?’

What are your top Internet marketing issues that your business is facing?

Why am I interested?

Partly to make sure that I’m writing the types of content that you want to hear about.

But also I’m curious if there is a common ground of mis-conception about how Internet marketing or SEO works.

So let’s help each other out - leave a comment below on your top Internet marketing issues that your business is facing.

It can be questions like:

• that you don’t understand social media
• how twitter works for a business
• why you would change a page title
• how to find the resources to make it happen
• where to start – there’s so much
• Should you use PPC?
• Not getting returns on paid advertising
• Not enough resources to pave the way
• too expensive

These are just some suggestions of things I’ve heard in the past.  I’d really like to know what your personal issues with online marketing are, so go ahead and leave a comment below -

The SEO Plan

Set & Almost Forget SEO Basics

1. What makes a word a keyword?
   Your website will be made up of many words, but a keyword is special, it is what your website is about. Take this one step further an define a keyword phrase as a group of words that define what your website is about.
   • Focus on 1 – 5 keyword phrases for your entire website.
   • Focus on 1 – 3 keywords phrases for your each individual page.
   • Keyword phrases need to be in heading, titles, hidden tags, etc.
   • Focus on keywords sounding natural in the text…don’t overuse.
2. Savvy to the Competition
   This is a very important point to understand: all businesses have both competitors on the web and competitors next door. What is your REAL competition on the web.
   • Where do they rank in the search engines?
   • What Keywords and keyword phrases are they focusing on?
   • Who is linking to them and why…what are they saying?
3. Form or Function on Website Design
   Always choose function! You could end up with a very pretty picture, that the search engines can’t see. Remember, search engines see text. How do you know if your web designer is really making and SEO friendly site?
   • Each page has a unique title and unique meta tags that describe the page.
   • Headlines are not in images…important words should always be in text only.
   • The designer has talked to you about unpalatable content or content management.
   • The designer has at least mentioned the word “keyword” in a conversation.
4. Set the Map
   A sitemap is a fundamentally important hidden part of all websites. It is the document that maps out your website for search engines and other spiders. This document controls what pages you want the search engines to find and which ones you want them to consider unimportant. You don’t have to know how to do one yourself, just to this sitemap generator and generate a sitemap for free.

The next article will focus on the tasks that should be done repetitively. These are scheduled tasks that should be done routinely to make sure that your efforts are paying off. Really, what is the point of doing all this work unless you are tracking and refining the process to get more conversions?

You have your work cut out for you…so away you go!

Writing the sales copy for your web page can be a daunting thing, but when you are a pacific away from your specific intentions, it is your readers that will not be able to make the leap.

When you are specific about what you have and what you want your readers to do, big things can happen.

• The search engines will find you when someone searching is as specific as you.
• Your readers will not have any questions about what you have and what they need to do to get it.
• Painting a very specific picture in a readers mind, usually makes them think of a friend that needs to see your message.
• There is no need to stuff keywords into your copy, keywords will naturally be there.

There seems to be an embarrassment to sell anything. I’m not sure when or where that happened, but selling is nothing more than a barter. In order to barter, you first need to explain all the benefits that your item can offer. Next, you need to inform the audience exactly what you are willing to receive, in return for all those benefits. In today’s society the barter is usually put in terms of currency.

When a professional SEO expert looks at sales copy on a web site, they look for these key pieces.

• Who will benefit from what you have to offer. It should be clear who your audience is.
• The offer. The most important part of any sales copy…the offer! If the offer is not strong and confident the rest of the page won’t matter.
• The direction Tell the reader exactly what you expect them to do…click on a button, fill out a form, or send you a million dollars. It doesn’t matter what the action is, just make sure you tell the reader the action.
• No apologies. Don’t apologize for giving a reader an opportunity. The reader may choose to move on, but never apologize for you offer.

The most important part of sales copy, be specific about what you want.

You might find when you are specific you paint a picture in a readers mind that reminds them of someone. The reader may just be inclined to forward your information on to that person.

Sales Copy with a Split Personality.

Always split test your sales copy. This is simply when you take two, or more, different approaches and have people land on different pages randomly. See which copy converts better.

This is especially true if you are using Google AdWords, or other search engine marketing techniques.

Split test your offer as well. Adding a special bonus, or changing the price even.

Never assume you know which headline, or offer, will convert.

Speaking of Conversions

The ultimate proof that your sales copy works is always in the conversion rate. So, how do you know what your conversion rate is?

First you need to have good analytics on your web site, there are some products out there that will even be able to tell you the conversion rate. If you are like most, and don’t have that, it is just a matter of simple math.

First take the number of sales that you have made over a given period of time. Divide that by the total visitors to your sales page for a given time period. Finally, multiply the answer by 100 to give you the percentage of visitors that converted to sales.

If you are not happy with the number you see, make small changes and split test again. Repeat this process until you are happy with the number.

Small sales copy changes, can make big conversion rate changes.

Be aware that by changes, it can go either way, so when you do something that causes conversions to go down, at least you know of one more thing that just didn’t work.

The Sales Offer

Are you motivated to create better copy on your web site?

Then let’s get started!

Today only, January 12th, I’m offering a free sales copy critique. This is not a rewrite, but I will offer advise. Yes, you read that right, this is a $200 value, yours free for following these simple steps.

• Click on the “Contact” tab.
• Fill in the form with your contact information.
• In the “Message” area mention that you are, “Motivated to create better copy!”
• Click on the Submit button.

On the off chance that you miss this offer, please follow the same steps above and in the “Message” area, “I’m a bum, I missed the date, could you please still look at my copy?” or something like that.

Who knows, maybe I will be feeling generous that day.

The Rocky Shore of Sales Copy

Yes, writing sales copy can be difficult, especially when you get caught up in the “sales” part.

Test, re-write, test, re-write, test, re-write, test…do you get the point?

Sales copy is not born overnight, it evolves. When something isn’t working, change it. When something is working, perfect it.

Have fun writing. Once you start seeing results, there will be no stopping you!

Question:What does lingerie have to do with an iPod?

Answer:The big guys in the industry are using pay per click (PPC) to show up on page one of Google.

When you do a search for lingerie, you would expect to see Victoria Secret on page one, however the only place on page one Victoria Secret exists is the paid advertising.

When you search for an iPod you expect to see Apple at that top, and you do, but Best Buy and Circuit City don’t show up on the first page naturally. Both companies choose to show up as advertisers, as does Bose for their iPod doc.

Is this a bad thing?

Absolutely not! In the search of being on page one there are certain keywords and terms that you should optimize your web site for. There are other keywords and phrases that are part of your business, but you might not want to optimize your site for them. These keywords and phrases might not be your core business, only a part of it.

Take for example Bose. Their core business is providing high quality sound for your home. Sure an iPod docking station is a part of that, so they want to be on page one.

Maybe Bose has a page on their web site dedicated to their docking station and they are working on the optimization of that page to get it to rank well in the search engines. What should they do in the meantime to make sure they show up on page one? This is where PPC really comes into play.
When there is a keyword that you know you want to be on page one for and your natural ranking is just not quite there, it is time to pull out your wallet and make sure you are there.

The first thing that needs to be decided is what keywords are important; this is really the hardest part. Next is the budget, it is really important to establish a monthly budget that you feel comfortable with. Finally, establish geographically where you target market is. Is your market only in one state, the entire US, maybe the US and Canada, or is it worldwide?

There are three search engines worth looking at that provide a keyword based advertising: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. At first there will be some experimentation in order to get successful campaigns. During this experimentation you might also find that there is one search engine that seems to bring you more qualified leads that actually convert at a higher rate.

In order to do any experimentation it will be necessary to set up analytics on your web site that will allow you to track where people are coming from and if that visit turns into a conversion. There are several packages out there that will do this; some analytics packages out there can be used at no cost.

Let’s look at an example budget of $400 a month. During the experimentation phase you would look at this in $100 chunks and make adjustments to your campaign as necessary. The end goal is to create a campaign that is bringing the most qualified leads that convert.

Being on page one is more about knowing when you should be on page one, not necessarily how you should get there.

One of the biggest challenges for a business professional both online and off, is the fear of being wrong. What if you have the wrong market? What if you are advertising on the wrong web site? Could you be wrong about buying a big billboard and only putting a web address on it?

Wrong…wrong…wrong….

In the meantime, your competition found a great market and is capitalizing on it. They advertise on any and all web sites that remotely make sense for their product. Not to mention, they have a great big billboard with their web site plastered all over it!

Would you rather be the business paralyzed by the fear of being wrong, or the one that is getting out there and works through being wrong?

All you have to do is make 2009 all about being wrong as fast as you can, to find the right.

As Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Total Domination of any market requires that you are wrong sometimes. You get the big billboard and realize that the return just doesn’t justify the cost. You advertise on every web site you can afford only to realize you should have just used Google Ads. You go after a market only to find that it is not profitable.

The point is, to find out right, wrong, or break even lies in the action required to test your theory.
I personally invite you to join us for a Total Domination New Year’s Party that will kick off a year to be wrong 10,000 time, just to find the right – you’re success!

Here is to a Total Domination New Year!

You may not be familiar with the term “long tail keyword”, but it is a simple concept really. If you are one to watch the statistics on your web site (if you’re not, you should), then you would know that sometimes people will find your web site using the most unusual phraseology.

Unusual phrases, the ones that are very targeted and specific, are referred to as the long tail. In short, it is the sweet spot of searchers that know exactly what they want. However, the downside is there are a lot fewer searchers that ride out there on the long tail.

Many Internet marketers make a great income focusing their marketing efforts using long tail strategies. The magic that makes it work is a searcher that knows exactly what they want and a web site that provides it.

Using a long tail keyword strategy is really no different than thinking in terms of niches, and as you may know, “there are riches in niches!”

Each web page on your web site is a niche, and it should be treated as a separate entity. Each individual page should have its own audience, marketing plan, and on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

Looking at a typical shopping cart, assuming you are selling books, there are hundreds of individual pages and each page is dedicated to an individual book. Think of Amazon.com as a book search engine, and each time a person enters a book title into Amazon.com, the results displayed contain all the web sites known to Amazon.com as having that book for sale. If you have never shopped on Amazon.com, I encourage you to search out a book, you will find that Amazon will usually stock the book and will offer to sell it to you; however, they will also display all the online used bookstores that you could also purchase from.

The top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are no different than Amazon.com. When a searcher enters a particular book title, the search engines are displaying pages when the book title is somewhere on the page. The search engines will not display the homepage simply because the web site as a whole has that book somewhere on it. A common misconception is the search engines see your entire web site as a whole, when in reality the search engine only sees one page at a time.

Take this one step further and put yourself in the shoes of a person searching for this book. Notice, I did not say your company. Assume that this potential customer does not know your company name, for that matter, they don’t even know you exist, or that you have the book they are looking for. This potential customer will enter a search string into the search box of their favorite search engine, and it is quite possible that it is not even the correct title of the book. So, how are they supposed to find you?

Looking at all your pages as individual marketing vehicles, we will take this example just one more step. If you carry a book on your website with the title, “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” and with a little research you find that there are a lot of people that enter “SEO in Minutes” in the search engines. You now know the web page that has the book “SEO in Five Minutes or Less” needs to contain the term “SEO in Minutes” somewhere on the page, several times if possible.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword tool is a good place to start to find those unique phrases that you should have contained on a given web page. There is also the capability to look at an individual page as Google sees is and identify if there are keywords that you are missing.

What you should come away with:

• Treat each web page as its own niche
• Each web page on a web site has a different audience
• Direct visitors to internal pages – they can find their way to the homepage if needed
• Know what terms are being searched for and make sure they are on the web page

Think like a professional SEO expert and see each web page on your web site as its own freestanding entity.

Marketing 101 – You can have the best product or service, but if you can’t get the right message to the right people your most likely outcome is failure.

There are many great products that are no longer available or sitting in a warehouse somewhere.  Why? The simple answer is the company that sold those products did not make the right marketing push to the right people, at the right time.  Sometimes it is simply a matter of giving up too soon and even though all the rest was right, the repetition wasn’t there.

Internet marketing is no different. First it takes time to find out where the target customer hangs out.

• Do they participate in forums?
• Are there particular web sites they frequently visit?
• Is there a product, or service, that is complimentary to your own where a customer may be found?
• What newsletters or ezines are they receiving in their inbox?
• Where online do they shop currently?

Knowing as much information about your prospective customers online behavior is just as important as knowing the general demographics of your customer.

This information can be very elusive and without it creating a targeted online marketing approach is no more targeted than randomly picking websites to advertise on.

Where do you start to find this information?

1. Ask you current customers – offer them an incentive for providing you with the answers you need…their online habits.
2. Survey on your website – again there could be an incentive for answering a few questions, these visitors may not be your customers yet, but knowing how they found you is a very important piece of your puzzle.
3. Analytics – web analytics software installed on your website is crucial and the prices range from free to the very expensive.  At minimum, find one that will tell you where your visitors came from and where they went to after visiting your web site, in addition to what they did while they were on your web site.

Test these techniques to see where you get the best information and continually monitor this information for the hidden nuggets of continuity and patterns that will start to emerge in your customers patterns.

Remember, your current customers, as well as visitors to your website hold the keys of information to where you will find more people like them…more of your target market.

Knowing where to put your online advertising, which social networks to belong to, and what pages on your web site are the most interesting to your customers is worth the small investment of time and money it will take to gather the information.

I saw this two minute segment of Survivor this past Sunday when I was walking back to my office, this is the only two minutes of this season that I have seen.  What struck me was the relevance of what he did to win that one million dollars and what it takes to win one million loyal customers.

Wow what a leap!  No, not really.  He won because every time he saw something he took note of it, or if possible he put it in his pocket.  For those marketing any type of product or service, squirreling away information is by far the most important task of any marketing effort.

I am reminded of how Joe Girard would collect information about each and every prospect that he spoke with and he would add to that information after each additional contact.  He referred to this as his intelligence system.  Every business needs an intelligence system.

In the Internet marketing world it is called list building.  A list is nothing unless you have the information and you know how to use it.  Survivor Bob not only knew that he might need a piece of string; he also found the perfect opportunity to use the string.

For most that market online, the list building starts and ends with the name and email address of the prospects.  That is just the piece of string, it is just the start!

Once the email address is captured the next goal is to find each and every opportunity to gather more information about that prospect.  Try some of these ideas to beef up your list:

1. Find something that you can send to your list, be it a free report, a training dvd, or an industry relative gift.  This gets you a physical address.
2. If appropriate for your industry, offer a wish list service.  This gets you a spouse’s name, or other family member names, and what products they are interested in.
3. Teleconference where your customers can email in ahead of time their questions.  This get’s you an interest point they have in your services.

Each and every time a customer talks to you on the phone, or contacts you by email, think of those contacts as strings.  Your job is to pick up the string, put it in your intelligence system whether it be a 3×5 index card system, or an elaborate database.

Now that you have the information gathered, what do you do with all of the new bits of information that you have.

This is what will set you apart from you competition.  This is the key to dominating whatever industry you are in.

Targeted and focused marketing efforts:

1. Send out a very targeted direct mail piece, make it personalized.  A special savings on a product that this target audience is interested in is a nice way to invite a customer back, but take it one step further and think like Amazon.  Offer a few selections that they may be interested in based on what you know about them.
2. Offer a very specific teleconference or seminar that targets a very unique group of people.  For example, if you find that many of your clients are MLM based companies, why not find a way to specifically help those clients and address their specific needs.
3. Find someone else that has complementary products or services to your own, and pair up together to offer your customers and even the new partner’s customers a combined deal.  This doubles your exposure and you are addressing needs your customer may have that your own company does not address.

As you can see the more information you have, the more target the effort can be.

Remember, this is a money saver!  This allows you to send out fewer pieces of mail, and get a higher return on what you send out.

What to take away from this article

• Gather information, even if you think you will never need it.
• Turn you marketing into a focused invitation to continue doing business with you.
• Partnerships to maximize your effectiveness to the customer and double or more the number of people exposed to your message.

No, really, a funny thing did happen.  I realized that not everyone understands what SEO is and why you need a professional SEO company.

Right now you might think that SEO stands for:

S“silly”

E “excuse” to

O “over charge”

Or maybe SEO means something like this:

S “someday”

E “everyone will land”

O “on my website”

Really SEO are three very important letters to your marketing efforts online that stand for “Search Engine Optimization.”

If you already have a website than you probably recognize that building the website and getting people to the website are two VERY different things.

For many of our clients, the first phone call is a desperate attempt to make their website that they spent thousands of dollars on, work for them.  They are left with a very attractive parking space on the Internet, with no traffic driving by to see that wonderful new website.

You might ask, “What is SEO?” The real question is, “How do I get more people to visit my website?” or “How does my website get found by Google <<insert Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.>>, I can’t find my website when I do a search.”

SEO and Internet marketing is the answer to all of those questions.  So, what should you expect to see from a professional SEO company?

1. Your website should have a detailed plan in place for increasing the number of visitors.
2. Your website should have changes made to make it more appealing to the search engines.
3. Your website should have its own online marketing plan to increase visibility.
4. Your website should have a local only plan to address online marketing locally.

In short, your website should have a complete plan, intent on getting noticed.  That is what SEO is about.   In order to get the return on investment (ROI), for the investment of a creating a website, there must also be a strategic online marketing plan focused on getting the number of visitors you need.

So what’s the trick? I substitute pronouns for nouns. There it is. That’s it. oops, I’ll have to go back and edit that. Dang it, that too… uggh. Pronouns are everywhere.

Don’t remember what a pronoun is? Well, a pronoun is a substitute for a noun. If there are any English professors that can help me out here, that would be great. Some common pronouns are: it, they, them, him, her and those. They are placeholders for something that you described previously.

So how do you use it? Correction. How should you use this technique of substituting a noun for a pronoun? Do you see how I substituted ‘it’ with ‘this technique of substituting a noun for a pronoun’ ? That’s how this technique works.

So how does this noun for pronoun substitution technique work, as it applies to search engine optimizations? This SEO technique works by:

1) providing more content to your readers and search engines. Longer posts/content give search engines a clue that it is quality content – length is one factor of a good post. More content also gives your readers an indication that you have something valuable to say. Ever find a post that is two sentences long? It’s really hard to get anything out of two sentences, and you leave the site with a sour taste in your mouth and you don’t want to return. Don’t let your customers and visitors get that sour taste in their mouth about your site. Give them quality content, and length and nouns is a great way to achieve this.

and

2) by giving search engines an increase in the keyword density of the words that you are using for nouns. If this page is a well targeted page to a certain keyword set, you will do everything in your power to keep the pronoun to noun substitutions focused around a certain subset of keywords. If however, your article or blog post is a general purpose article that could garner visitors from a number of keywords, then you will be utilizing un-targeted keywords, which is still going to be found by someone somewhere. For most articles, I prefer to target a pre-defined set of keywords that I’ve researched well in advance, but I’ll take a non-targeted keyword set over a pronoun any day of the week.

So there you have it. blast! Common cliches use pronouns so often, that I find that I’m still using the cliches. Don’t go overboard with the pronoun to noun technique, only use it when it makes sense (like this sentence)

So go back through your site, and see if you can optimize your site for the search engines by making a few small tweaks to your pronouns. You won’t see immediate nor dramatic effects, but keep an eye on your web analytic stats over the next few months after you do this, and it just might surprise you on the keywords that people are finding you with.

The three choices are:

• Hire professional SEO services
• Learn search engine optimizations and internet marketing yourself
• Put your head in the sand and let your business flail until it goes under

In the world on the Internet (marketing aside) – there are all sorts of things that people go to the Internet to do – shop, read the news, find jokes, do research – all the things that people do in the offline world, they now are spending a considerable amount of time doing online. So what ever community you may have in the offline world – your business, your industry, your city, your charity, your school club – you can have these same communities in the online world.

In the offline world – where you have a brick and mortar store of some sort – you either hire someone to do your marketing, you learn to do it on your own, or eventually you go out of business.

The online world is exactly the same

The rate of return is comparable too – hiring a marketing agency will produce far better results than your own marketing plans, because the have the experience, expertise, and they live and breathe marketing every single day.

So lets come back to the Internet marketing world

You can hire a professional SEO consultant to do the work for you and get exceptional results, or you can do the SEO and Internet marketing services yourself and keep afloat, or you can do nothing, and your website will sit there and do nothing too.

Likely, if you are reading this page, you already know that if you own a business, you have to market you business online. Just choose the right method for you. If you didn’t know this previously, and have done nothing to promote your site online and have read this far, congratulations. You’ve just made a huge impact on your psyche.

I would be most honored if you would leave me a comment that said “Thank You for showing me the way” – It may not pay my bills, but it makes me feel good to know that my articles and blogs about search engine marketing are helping someone grow their business.