The Click Depot Blog

5 Ways to Know If Your Internet Marketing Firm Is A Scam?

Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are established businesses these days and there are dozens of such firms in every major city in the US. Well, there are many many more online that don’t even have an office or a registered company. These so called Internet Marketers operate from home and some don’t even have a website. Nothing wrong with any of that, except that many of them also end up scamming you. Long story short, they don’t know what they are doing, claim things that aren’t true, make promises that they can’t deliver and overall, end you up in a mess. Unfortunately, many SEO firms are the same way too.

So, how do you know if your Internet Marketer or SEO firm is scamming you?

5. Do they have a website? Is their website optimized for Search Engines?

You will be surprised how many Internet Marketers operate without a website. A company’s website says a lot about how much time and effort they’ve invested into a business. Especially for an Internet business, their website will reflect what they know about the business too. For instance, if their own website is optimized for search engines and is ranking well for their key search term, then that says that the company couldn’t have been formed yesterday and probably has a good track record. That doesn’t guarantee that they will do a good job for you, but at least gives you one more reason to believe that they are real and professional. An easy way to tell if their website is optimized for search engines is to look for the basics - Are their page URL’s full of giggerish or do they have user-friendly words in them? Do their pages load quickly or do they take forever? Take the first few words from the page title on their home page and search using those terms on google. Do you see their website?

4. Is the firm registered with BBB?

BBB - Better Business Bureau is a good place to look for compaints against a company. If your SEO firm has a whole bunch of complaints, they are obviously not a good choice.

3. Do they have “too many” good reviews?

Back in the day, to review any service, all you had to do was go to Google and type <Service name> review. Not anymore. These days, there are tons or sites that write paid reviews. So, chances are that your SEO firm used some of those paid sites to get good reviews. In fact, if you see too many “too good to be true” reviews or testimonials, I would actually take that as a negative.

2. Do they use good SEO and Internet Marketing practises?

Do they use black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, Etc.? Do they buy email lists and spam them? Important - where do they stand on SEO ethics? Do they think that it’s OK to get to the top of the search engine by hook or by crook or do they stand by their morals. The reason why this is important is that most long-lasting SEO companies understand the importance of ethics to thier business. There will always be a gray area, but the ‘whiter’ you are, the better your chances of success. The good SEO companies know that. A good way to find out is to suggest to the company that you WANT them to use black hat techniques. If they agree, you’d know.

1. What does their Internal setup look like?

There are way too many “SEO firms” out there that actually have ZERO employees. The one person shops outsource everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it could be a smart business move. Do they have any sales people? How many dedicated resources do they have internally? Do they offer a timeliness guarantee? These questions will help you determine whether the company can meet your SEO and Internet Marketing expectations.

Do not hestitate to ask these questions to your prospective SEO company. Better safe than sorry, right?

Android & the new G1 phone - Is this the future of Mobile Advertising?

Apple, Microsoft and Google inevitably end up locking horns with each other. Apple and Microsoft have been rivals for over 25 years now and it can be said that, for the most, part, Microsoft won the battle of the computer titans. Apple re-invented themselves with their i-vision. ipods, itough, iphone, imac, macbook pro, Etc. and before you knew, Apple was hot again - how many Apple devices do you and your family together have (including old versions that you upgraded)? You might be surprised to see that most families now have more Apple devices than any other hardware manufacturer. But is all that about to change with Google Android and G1? Well, we think YES. And here’s why.

Search is important to Google and we all know that. They are a $100 Billion market-cap company and 95% of that is from search-related revenues. The mobile business is taking off, we know that because in Europe and Asia, which is generally behind the curve on innovation compared to the US, but when it comes to the use of mobile phones, they are way ahead. As US catches up, there is a huge market here that Google will want to tap. Internal sources in Google  bloggers reveal that they are taking this mobile thing VERY seriously. It’s obvious, as people switch to using the mobile phone for more and more of their general internet browsing needs, searches will move to that area and that’s where the money will be as well.

The PC operating system market went to Microsoft, Google wasn’t even born then. But here’s their second chance, and possibly bigger than the first one due to the ready availability of a huge market with limited competition, compared to Microsoft’s challenge of creating a market for their products 20 years ago. This time Google’s biggest competitor is not Microsoft though, it’s Apple!! Yes, iPhones are amazing and are arguably the most advanced cell phones for entertainment purposes out there. Google is releasing the Andriod operating system which takes that to the next level. It packs entertainment features alongside with great search and easy emailing features. Things that most people also want in addition to just pictures and music. They now have it all - the #1 search engine in the world, ($$$) a great mobile operating system (OS) and the G1 phone (Hardware). Sounds like a winning combination to me. Iphones are great, but when search the ‘net on them, you really don’t feel like clicking on ads like you do when searching on the PC. G1 is optimized for Google Search more than any other device.

So, as I saw the new G1 phone advertised on the Google home page and on the Tmobile phone upgrades site, I was forced to think - is this it? Is this going to change everything. If Google ends up capturing a few million people that are G1 fans and can’t stop talking about it and actually start clicking on ads, this could change a lot of things in the search and mobilie advertising market. And we think it will.

So, if you are a small or even large business and like to stay ahead of the curve on markteing, here’s your chance. Invest in mobile and search advertising today..

The Amazing Yelp

Yelp.com is all over the place these days. They have a community in just about every major city in the country, especially the west coast. It started at San Francisco, which is undoubtedly the hub for Internet-related innovation. It must be a fun life out there in SFO for people that are Internet savvy. So what’s so great about this site? Here’s some statistics on the site that we dug up from a few different sites.

Traffic

As you can see, there are in the same league as top sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us, which are huge social bookmarking sites. The difference though is that people visit social bookmarking sites more for fun than for real information. On the other hand, Yelp is a reviews site that people go to look for information on businesses and things to do in places. If you are a small business, you should be worrying about getting yourself placed on local search results and sites such as Yelp.com should be on your agenda for cheap marketing tactics.

Here’s more statistics about this site:

Those are some amazing numbers that most sites can only dream of. And the best part? The owners of the site don’t spend a dime on marketing the site (alright, may be that’s an exaggeration,  but you get it). All content on the site is user generated. And as you know, content is king in the Internet world. So guess what that means? The site will grow exponentially as more users take to it and the value keeps going up, all thanks to the great site features that its visitors love.

The lesson learned from this is not anything new, but a reinforcement of the idea that building a community is THE best way to make a website successful. Create a a community around your site using features such as blogs, forums, polls, rewards programs, give-aways, Reviews, Etc. Find creative ways to engage your visitors to interact and add content to your site. And that process can be fun too. It’s an amazing feeling to see a community grow, just like it is to see your business grow. And more often than not, the former can lead to the latter as well.

Don’t wait. Local search and online marketing can be your competitive edge.

Top 5 All-Time Local Search Engine Optimization Tips

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your web site is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean? What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. We wrote a post about this recently - raleigh internet marketing

With millions of companies competing for top 10 placements for their products and services, local search engine optimization provides a competitive advantage as well as allows consumers to conveniently shop locally as a result of using the web to locate the best deals.

In addition, local internet consumers are prone to shopping locally and prefer working with local businesses. The advantages are options like (a) checking their references (b) performing due diligence (c) establishing trust or (d) meeting in person to finalize deals are easier compared to a national organization.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some ideas to improve Organic Ranking of your site on web.

5. Link to Local City Searches

List your company with CitySearch. CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN.com, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others. Also consider listing on http://www.superpages.com, http://www.infousa.com, http://www.yellowpages.com, http://www.magicyellow.com and http://www.directorym.com

4. Add Contact information on your site

Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your site. Such information builds trust rank value for your web site too.

Search engines pay particular attention to proximity as well as keyword density (the number of times the keyword appears) as well as proximity to other keywords or qualifiers. A qualifier is a term like services, company, professional, expert, affordable, specialist, etc. and are used specifically to (a) add relevance to your keywords or (b) assist your positioning when people use them in search queries.

3. Use the city name and abbreviation of the state in the title or description tag

Pages are interpreted and indexed with the in title, in anchor and in text so understanding this provides one more unique opportunity to construct your pages in accordance to standards which are known to affect how search engines rank and respond to your content.

2. Submit your company’s listing

Submit listing to some top directories like Yelp, Insider Pages, City Squares.com, and MojoPages.com. Submit to Internet Yellow Pages like SuperPages.com, Yellow Pages, Info Space, and Switchboard.com. Submit to Local Search Engines like Google local Business Centre, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search. Submit your company to Data Providers like Geosign Corporation, Info USA Sales Solution.

1. Add the qualifiers or specific geographic terms

This rule applies if you have qualifiers in the title, description and page, then solidifying the affect of the collective goal of the page for the sake of word density can be accomplished. For an added kick, hyperlink the main terms in the footer on every other page and point them to your about us page, which usually has the highest concentration of local and geographic information.

Bonus Tip: Hyper link the city and function of your web page

When employing links, the less the better for the strength of the link, also the higher up on the page a link is placed, the higher relevance it garners.

Are you using local Search Engine Optimization yet?

Ever wondered how to attain higher local search engine rankings? Here are a few SEO tips to strengthen organic search engine placement. Although the competition can be fierce from local businesses, local search engine optimization is far less convoluted by comparison to national search engine placement.

Creating a truly effective marketing campaign online takes a lot of work that consumes a great deal of time for small business owner. Simply having a website will be suitable to many, but this is hardly relevant if it is poorly designed, hard to use, or bland. The process starts with having a website but never truly ends. Maintaining the site, targeting an audience, tracking statistics of visitors and other factors has to be employed to grow your business in the information age.

What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. Ranking above the fold, the top 10 positions for your most relevant keywords is important, particularly locally which can facilitate calls or walk in traffic. Local optimization services should be tailored to meet the requirements of all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN to achieve search engine visibility.

Local Internet marketing is a cost-effective advertising method for your online business. Local search results through local marketing campaigns can yield qualified loyal repeat local business for a fraction of the cost of television, print or radio advertising. If you haven’t considered local search engine optimization as a viable alternative, your business could be missing dozens of calls, emails or leads every day. Local search marketing can secure organic rankings top 10 for your website for keywords related to your city or state.

Local SEO is one of the most effective forms of internet marketing and online advertising. Optimizing your site for local terms such as your city, state, surrounding county or suburbs not only produces a steady flow of regional business for your company, but brings more revenue into your community.

The more qualified visitors that frequent your site, the more likely you are to sell your product or services. However, all traffic is not created equal. Although a number of regional websites are available for local marketing such as craigslist.org, Topix, the Yellow Pages, Google, Yahoo just to name a few, unless there is a common thread that unifies your marketing message, the optimal keywords used for positioning and offer you are promoting, you may as well be shouting your offer from rooftops to random passerby’s.

The long-term effectiveness of online advertising is more complex and requires a bigger time investment than most choose to accept. Setting up a campaign is the easiest part, but because it’s so easy, everyone does it. Reviewing, tracking, testing and changing require not only proper setup and analysis, but also regular follow-up modifications. All of this becomes a fairly technical undertaking, but because it is hard, not many are willing to dedicate the extra effort even if it means sacrificing income and future clients.

To be honest, if you value your time and money, you probably want to find an expert to help you with all the fine-tuning and analysis. By working with an expert, you’ll virtually guarantee that your resources will be used with high-efficiency and will attain results that you could do on your own after a great deal of frustration and many hours later. Once you have an effective website and strong online marketing campaign, you won’t have to chase customers; the customers will come to you.

Obama uses Internet Marketing. Shouldn’t you be doing it too?

Obama has charisma. Does that rhyme?:). But he’s got more than that - he’s got the country’s liberal youth on his side now. He’s got the 20-somethings that traditionally rarely appear at voting booths talking to each other about him now. And how did he do it? Did he use a million dollar defense-developed system for magically infesting youth minds or nobel-prize winning economic theories? Not really. All he did was use the power of Internet and Mobile marketing to his advantage. He used the same tools and techniques that a Plumber, a Carpenter, a Doctor, a Restaurant or any other business can use. In fact, we even know what tools he used and they cost hardly anything.

He contracted with local and national Search marketing and Internet Marketing firms. He built an Email list. He used mobile marketing. He used www.icontact.com, a tool to build email lists, something that we’ve used for a long time.

Read this detailed report about the use of SMS in the US, and how Obama’s clever use of SMS in the presidential race has made it a huge success with businesses around the country.

All this should either confirm your approach and belief in the Internet as an ever-growing marketing tool. If it’s sounding like something you haven’t invested in yet, take our advice, do it now! Trust me, you don’t even need a website to do that. We do it all the time and help small companies realize their dreams.

Mobile marketing, Google Android and more

The big news this weekend seems to be the insider news leak about the possible launch of Google Android on Tmobile handset in September. This source reported a nice story about Google Android.

OK, now, why is that important to you? Here’s why:

1. 3G is just getting to become a huge phenomenon in the US. This is the new generation wireless communication protocol that will make sharing videos and large data files much easier. This has the potential to explode cell phone usage for Internet access. The iPhone already started this trend in a big way earlier this year. Google Android will make it bigger. Other countries in Asia (Japan) and Europe are already into this stuff and US lags behind. But we have the largest volume of consumers and the most amount of online spending and Internet users. If 3G takes off in the US, things can change for marketing firms very quickly.

2. Today, the big change seems to be people moving from using the Yellow Pages to using http://maps.google.com to find businesses. This shift was quite big. People had to learn the use of computers and know the ways of the Internet. Even then, this happened in less than a decade. People already use cell phones and when the same applications such as Google Maps and Google Android will be available on the cell phone, people will transfer much quicker to using cell phones instead of going to their PC’s as much.

3. You can stay ahead of the curve in the following ways.

A. If you have a budget for marketing that you can spend on mobile marketing, then talk to a mobile marketing firm. They can get your ads and brandname on multiple mobile applications.

B. Get yourself listed on Google Maps and other online mapping applications such as Yahoo Maps. MapQuest.com and others. These are getting used on the mobile phone in a big way already.

C. Add a “Send me an SMS” feature on your website. Encourage your website visitors to contact you via sms on your cell phone. http://smseverywhere.com/webmasters.htm. Now, this will have to be done with caution. You might have to keep a separate cell phone line for this purpose alone. I haven’t seen too many people try this but I can see it happening in the near future. Of course, 5-10 years from now, everyone will have cell phones than can handle email very well and sms will slowly become almost extinct or at least slow down in usage. Until then, this might be a good idea to grab the attention of your visitors. Who is more likely to contact you? Someone that just sees a regular contact us form on your website or someone that sees a “conctact me via sms” box and knows that you will receive his message immediately and may even respond to it in the next 30 seconds via sms to his cell phone?

There are many more ways, but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. In marketing, as in business, staying ahead of the curve is important. Don’t do it after everyone else is doing it. Read the signs and get in early.

The number one marketing tool - Your Email List

If you have a company with more than 20 customers and you don’t have an email list yet, you are missing out on the most powerful marketing strategy in the planet. Earlier, we wrote about 3 steps to establish your online presence and social marketing ideas for your small business. Building an email list comes even higher than anything we talked about in those articles.

Despite using email and knowing about the benefits of this technique, many business users choose to ignore it, perhaps due to the lack of time. But here’s why you need to jump into this NOW.

1. People hate spam. Everyone I know already gets more email than they can handle. And it’s only going to get worse. However, there are several niches where people still don’t get the info they need easily. You can enter their address books now and slowly and steadly, using quality articles and newsletters that you send them, build their confidence and the results (more sales) will pay off. If you wait, chances are that someone else (your competitor) will start sending them emails and then when you send yours later, yours is spam. Got the idea?

2. Building a reliable email list takes time: I know a person who has a list of 30000+ people. Every time he feels like making some money, he simply sends the list an email and talks about a cool product with an affiliate link. and there you go, a few hundred dollars almost instantly. But it took him several years to get there and he spent a lot of money trying to advertise his site via search engine optimization to get there. But it pays off now. If you start today, within a year, your list could have a couple of hundred people (at least, even if you don’t do it aggressively).

The best way to start building your list is to GIVE SOMETHING AWAY for free on your website. People love free stuff. Give away a free product sample, discount on a product on your website, a free cruise, a free informational newsletter (though that is losing its charm due to spam), even a free wallpaper or a video that you created. Trust me, people will take it. Of course, the more useful and relevant the freebie is to your visitors, the higher the signup rate usually. And in exchange, you sign them up with their Name and Email. People often always sign up thinking they will unsubscribe from your list once they have the freebie but research shows that if your freebie was good and the following emails are useful, a majority actually stay and become a loyal member of your email list.

There are some very good email list management software out there. My favorites are Aweber and Mailchimp

Social marketing ideas for your business - facebook ads

Any business owner knows how important marketing is. Most spend tons of money on advertising on print media, yellow pages, online yellow pages, Etc. I am amazed that this trend continues to this day. It is a fact that people that used to use Yellow Pages are rapidly beginning to use the Internet as a way of finding businesses. Unless your target audience is people aged 50+, you are likely placing your bet on the wrong cards.

Online marketing is easy, inexpensive and rapid. None of these can be said about off-line techniques. Here are five ways that you can market your business online yourself without spending a dime. And no, I am not going to tell you things that you already know, such as creating your website and adding a blog to it, and so on. Not even standard local marketing techniques such as the ones we discussed 3 ways to establish your online presence. In facrt, what I am going to tell you does not even require you to have your own website. I am talking about some creative techniques that a lot of people are not looking at right now. In a previous post about The best part, it can actually be fun to engage in these kinds of “social marketing” efforts.

Create a facebook ad page for your busienss: WAKE UP! Social networking is the fastest growing online segment. Even faster than search, faster than Google and MSN put together. Ten year old kids and Seventy-five year old grandmas alike are taking to this. So how can you benefit from it? Simple. Create a profile at http://www.facebook.com/ads. It takes 10 minutes or less and it’s drop dead easy. If you can handle email, you can handle facebook. The process of creating the account includes importing your contacts from your address book on Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or any such email account that you may be using. Once that is done, just add pictures, text, etc. to your account.

Every time you add anything to your account (a new picture, a video, additional profile info, news about your life, etc.), your friends get notified. OK, so that sounds like a great personal networking tool. I know you are thinking - Alright, but how can that benefit my business? Well, business networking starts with friends. You can also invite your customers to join your ‘friends’ list on your business profile. Each time you add something, they get a notification on their facebook account about it. This might all seem useless to you, but when you consider that over 50 million users use Facebook, this starts to make sense. Your customers will have facebook pages soon, if not already. You can appear tech-savvy and cool and at the same time connect with your customers and contacts.

The more time you spend on your facebook ad updating stuff, the more you remind your customers and contacts about your business. You will be surprised the kind of wonders a cool reminder service such as this can work. I know a local restaurant owner that tried this with myspace and his results are phenomenal. I suggested facebook because they are growing faster than myspace, have better features and actually allow businesses to create ad pages.

Don’t just leave this page - go create your ad page NOW - http://www.facebook.com/ads and add their toolbars to your website or blog.

Google Tricks - How To Find The World’s Top 100 Highest Page Rank Websites

1. Simple. Search for the word http on Google. The top 100 pages (or even 1000) pages by page rank appear.
2. Want to know what Google thinks are the 1000 most popular websites in the world? Enter www in your search result and see for yourself!
3. Want to know what google applications are the most popular and which ones aren’t, just enter google
4. Want to search within a site but the damn site does not have a search bar. No problem just search for <keyword> site:yoursite.com. For example, search advertising site:theclickdepot.com and you’ll never again spend valulable time navigating through a site.
5. Want to exclude certain sites from your search results? Go ahead and exclude them with -site. For example, use seo books -site:amazon.com. This will show books from all but amazon.com
6. Want to know who’s linking to you? Just type link:url for example link:theclickdepot.com will show you who links to us. But remember, Google reveals only a fraction of the actual link information with this command. Noone knows why. Yahoo Site Explorer shows much more.

We got more coming…sign up to our RSS feed to stay informed!