The Click Depot Blog

Thanks to one man’s initiative in which he decided to use the social media for business purposes and began marketing his product and services extensively on social media websites, a large number of businessmen have begun using this excellent marketing strategy for getting in touch with their potential clients on the Internet. That is the reason why Facebook, YouTube, Multiply Gather, Twitter and Friendster are being used by farsighted businessmen for marketing their products to visitors online.
If you have full intentions of doing the same thing you would want to develop a social media strategy, which is not only effective, but manages to give you profitable returns at the end of the day. You start the strategy by signing in on a number of social media websites.
The point is to introduce yourself to the general public and show that you have a face behind the company. After that, you are going to start a methodical download or upload of a number of videos, photos, as well as music; any sort of media which includes information about your product, company and services comes under the social media network marketing strategy.

Even though the services are free and thousands of blog posts are entered on these websites every single day, a businessman is going to have a much better chance of having his blog read, by people who are interested in his particular products. This naturally is a much better way of marketing and advertising than spending lots of money on ads in journals and newspapers.
That is the main reason why many marketing firms have begun using social media websites in their marketing campaign.

To begin your social media strategy and marketing campaign, you need to set out one particular goal. What is the name of your company and which target market are you interested in? Which particular social media site caters to that particular target market? You are naturally going to be doing a little bit of research on these sites.

Your job is to make new connections, and to tell your already existing clients and connections that you are alive and ticking. This is at the top of your priority list, especially when you are building a new marketing strategy which includes social media.

Social media has taken the old marketing strategies of using market surveys to find out the opinion of general consumers, regarding some particular product, to the new stage of free discussions on the product quality, online. That is why you have to keep in touch with the pulse of the general public and that can only be done by looking at the reviews, views, and discussions going on in forums.
You need to go out amongst your clients and general public and become visible. You need to make sure that the customer service is so perfect that any problem is solved within 24 hours.

The Customer is King and never more so than when he is sounding off online. One unhappy customer is quite capable of losing you more than a 100 prospective customers in the future. So when you go online and manage to talk to your customer about his problems, it shows that you care.
This marketing strategy is not only going to make your social media presence quite strong, but it is going to do wonders for your future business prospects. This also includes taking part in a number of forums online and explaining queries and FAQ’s to any prospective client, who is interested in buying your product in the near future.

Extensive research needs to be done so that you know exactly who your customers are and where they can be found. You could use Technorati, through which you can find blogs and websites related to your product, through a search query. You would also want to try out the marketing scope of Twitter. It has a really good search and monitoring tool called Twitscoop.

Once you know about the specific needs and requirements of the customer, you would want to tell them that you are capable of giving them a product, which deals with solving that particular requirement and need.
You would need to measure The Traffic with Google Analytics, Social Mention and Tweetreach. These free tools give you a broad idea of how positive your participation in the discussion was and you can base your communication strategy using the data obtained by these tools.
Once you have found a good social media strategy, which works, stick to it!

Image Courtesy : http://ictkm.cgiar.org/2009/07/29/social-media-the-next-revolution/

Developing the perfect link building plan for your website can require a little of digging into the purpose of your site, business, and how you plan to help others with your information. In the online marketplace, a website’s importance can come from numerous factors including:

Age of the website
Traffic flow
Popularity and Inbound Links
Directory submissions
Unique Content

But, the troubles of developing a link building plan should start with your ideas of how you want your site to grow. Many people make the misconception that owning a website automatically builds their rank in the search algorithm - it is not true. You have to work hard to develop interesting content, work with a professional firm that can handle the massive workload of keeping up your link building efforts. Before you hire a professional to manage your SEO campaign, consider researching respective sites and developing content before joining directories across the web. Use smart, targeted steps towards building your inbound links on the web.

Research Respective Websites

A respective website (or high ranking site) is one with a lot of popularity. Respective sites such as government affiliated, professional organizations, and leading authoritative websites can help boost your link building plan in an instant. If you want to capitalize on the inbound links you have, you should work with other webmasters in placing your links on their sites for traffic. Many webmasters are open to new ideas, opportunities, and partnerships with smaller website owners because they had to work from the ground up. Helping you attract customers is a way of building rapport with respective influencers in a small way; consider the possibilities of attracting more links with setting one on a frequently visited page.

Develop Articles/Blogs/Signatures

Articles are the number one reference in building authority on the web. As you have noticed, everyone has published at least five articles somewhere to get their names out there. You have to be smarter, work harder, and write more distinctive content in your niche to keep a selective audience’s attention. Consider this - you are a pediatrician interested in building clientele in your market by link building online. You can have links on your articles, signatures in social networks, and professional profiles. These inbound links can pinpoint readers to the exact pages you want them to see on your websites.  Work with a professional SEO firm in order to integrate the proper content for the right market. The more emphasis you place on a single market - the better returns you will have in your link building efforts on respective sites.

Join Highly Selective Directories

Prominent directories (ones everyone fears) are the best ones to join in order to increase your link building. Some people join highly selective directories to place their site before a loyal market of surfers that only visit those directories for information. You have to work closely in developing unique content, organizing your site, and submitting it to these directories purposefully. By organizing your link building plan, you can take advantage of many opportunities available on the web. Contact your local SEO Company for more details by visiting www.ClickDepot.com to learn how they can assist in developing your website’s online presence.

Image Courtesy:  www.seopositions.net/blog/tag/blog

Backups are necessary. We just talked about that in the previous post. I talked about Aronis True Image. Acronis is great to get a backup of your computer - incluging the OS, files, applications, Etc. OK, but where do you put your backups? Most people backup to an external hard drive or DVD’s that are stored right in the shelf next to the computer. While that might be OK in 99% of the cases, there is always that unfortunate chance that your entire office or home gets in the path of a hurricane, flood or forest fire. Now we sincerely hope that no such thing happens to you, but you’ll sleep better knowing that your most imporant personal and business data is protected in such a situation. Keeping your backups off-site is the way to go. Sooner done the better.

Cost for off-site backups used to be high in the past. Most often you’d need a dedicated server and end up costing thousands of dollards annually. Now that’s a thing of the past. Welcome to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a web-service based offering by Amazon. Amazon has a tremendously powerful website as you know at Amazon.com. It gets more traffic than all websites in Raleigh put together perhaps and more complex features than most websites on the Internet and millions of vendors selling their products on their website. A fully automated product management and inventory management capability and the ability to provide guarantees on price, shipping, delivery and a solid feedback mechanism. To run all that is no simple task. They have thousands of servers in state-of-the-art data centers and configurations that few people in the world can image. Such capability meant that they are experts in not just selling online but also on IT infrastructure. They are also experts on webservices and one of the first to bring serious ones to the market that allow other people to create stores using amazon products for an affiliate commission.

As a smart company, they decided to put those 2 fields of expertise to use - web service and IT infrastructire. And that gave birth to Amazon S3 and we’re sure you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. In essence it’s a service that makes it easy to trasfer your files from your PC or your website to Amazon via a high-bandwidth connection (which is a BIG deal, because uploads over the internet are generally slow, which makes it difficult to upload a large amount to data off-site on a regular basis). And the best part is that it’s cheap. At about 20 cents per GB of storage, it’s really cheap for the kind of protection that Amazon offers. No wonder many are using it already since the launch in 2006.

Several companies such as Seco backup and EzS3 have tools available that make it easy to use Amazon’s service. This is a handy list of amazon s3 tools. Jungle Disk and Backup Manager are perhaps the leading ones in the PC and Mac home backup market.

Another benefit of Amazon S3 is saving storage space. I used to have tons of unused storage space at home. Hard disks, DVD’s, zip drives that are hardly used, etc. Each of them would have some backup that I did at some point and I didn’t want to risk deleting them so they kept taking up space. Another problem with website backups is that once your website becomes slightly larger (500 MB - 1 GB storage or more), downloading the website’s files on a regular basis for backup takes forever and breaks all the time due to network issues. Having automatic backups with Amazon S3 takes care of both of those issues for the most part.

Give it a serious thought. You set it up once and forget. Worth the money and highly recommended!

Marketing for small business often means working with a print company to print some coupons, fliers, postcards, brochures and sending it out to a million people. Of course, you have a website that does nothing for you other than help people find directions to your shop front once in a while. You think most people want to call you anyway so you are OK with that. Well, things have changed.

Small business is not really that easy anymore. Especially in recessions, there are large number of startups from people that have lost their jobs. You need to get creative with your marketing ideas to be able to survive and thrive. And the best part, it’s a LOT of fun. It’s like playing a game of Age of Empires - you plan and implement strategies and gauge results - which means more money! OK, I got a little carried away there - Age of Empires is not as much fun as creative marketing is

So what is creative marketing? Well, it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ten years ago, having a website that was used effectively was creative marketing. Today, that’s a necessity. Creative marketing today is finding ways to reach your clients that few people in your market are doing. Here are some examples:

1. Search Engine Optimization is one such way, which is actually fast becoming  necessity. You optimize your websites for certain key phrases. Create specific content on your site that is targeted at new key phrases that are emerging in your market space. This helps you create new market share on an active ongoing basis.

2. Dynamic businesses thrive in today’s market. Frequent change is liked by customers and they think of you more often that way. You also reach a broader audience since different offers may fly with different people. A new coupon or offer every week on your website or print newsletter.

3. Give stuff away that’s useful in your target market. Easiest way to make inroads in a market that has many players already. Make it fun too. For instance, if you have website, use your developer’s help to create a sweepstakes giveaway that includes  a slot machine. Visitors click on the slots and if they win, they get something from your products or services free. To play, they enter their email - now you can market to them after they leave. Email marketing is not creative marketing anymore - it’s a must. But finding creative ways to get your leads’ email in a safe, non-intrusive manner is where the creativity comes in.

If this sounds like too much work for you, talk to us. We can work out a creative marketing package for you and help you stand out!

Autoresponders are that little piece of software that most online businesses cannot live without. They help automate, and in fact, envigorate your communications with your customers and leads. If this is not sounding familiar to you already, then you really should be worried right now, and here’s why:

1. Most online businesses make at least 50% of their sales through their Email list. That means that regardless of how many visitors you have to your website, unless you have a email list of potential leads, you are probably missing out on at least 50% of your sales opportunity. We work for a client that actually does 100% of their sales through Email Marketing and direct mail and almost none via their regular website visitors that come in from search results and Adwords. That’s because in their niche, people don’t often buy on their first visit, and need to be reminded multiple times before a sale is made. Another one of our clients has a website that gets almost 50K visitors per month, many of which are paid clicks from Adwords. He promotes several products on his site and gets paid each time a product that he promotes is sold (typical affiliate marketing). Sounds like a business model, right? You pay for clicks and sell product. Not quite. If that is all he did, he’d actually be losing money. instead, he makes aorund $20K per month. How? He builds an email list via this website and promtes a related coaching service to them via Email marketing. Now, that’s smart and that’s precisely how important autoresponders are to you as well.

2. Autoresponders and Email is immediate. Almost no other form of marketing can boast of that. Direct mail, TV, Radio, Cold calls, all have a lag. Email on the other hand is almost immediate. For some of our clients, we see sales within seconds of sending out an email blast. That’s how responsive the list if you build it carefully.

3. Email marketing is a great way to get feedback. In most businesses, entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of trying out their product and getting feedback before putting the product out. With a loyal email list, you can put out early prototypes or just get a survey or poll result to know whether the product is likely to fly with that crowd. What a useful thing!
Now that you know how useful Email marketing can be, the next step is to pick your Email Marketing Software. Unfortualtely, that can be a pretty time consuming complicated decision to make. And for reasons explained here, it’s one of the most imporatant ones you will make for your business.

There are 2 ways to get a online store quickly. Either get a software product such as CRE Loaded or OScommerce, and host your website on your own domain or get a store using a hosted service such as the Ystore by Yahoo. In recent days, YStore has risen in popularity, for a few reasons.

1. YStore is hosted and services/software, Etc. are managed by Yahoo. Even for tech-savvy webmasters, managing regular security upgrades on the software is a challenge. Additional modules and third party components are great, often free, but ensuring that they work well with your site is really left up to you. And then when the site gets hacked (which does happen to regular sites, trust me!) bringing the site back up is perhaps the craziest time you’ll spend behind a computer. Leaving that up to the experts is often a good idea in the long run. Ystore is a very reasonably priced hosted solution considering that it’s backed by the world’s #2 Internet company.
2. Creating products is a piece of cake with Ystore. Most fields can be entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded into the site. Images can be uplaoded easily as well.
3. Ystore comes with a whole bunch of features for promoting your products online, analyzing sales, search keyword data, Etc. This is a useful thing to have from a single dashboard. As against other offerings where you will need to usually deal with a separate product or third party for many of those features.
4. Optimizing Ystore for search engines is simple. You don’t even need to know HTML. Just log into Store Editor, edit each page, enter the Page title and meta tags into their fields, that’s it. Now, to know what to enter into those fields needs some knowledge of SEO concepts and keyword research. But a good SEO company should be able to do that for you.

Now, not everything is that perfect about the Ystore and you should know that before you jump in.

Ystore makes YStore for novice store owners. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. For instance, it’s not easy to change the URL of a page once you enter it once. According to several sources, changing product URL’s requires changing the product ID and a re-upload of the catalog, which can end up breaking the existing incoming links to the site. To my knowledge, URL redirects for Ystore URL’s is not easy either. We are still researching some of these issues, but as we do that, we are realizing that there is not enough information about Ystore SEO on the Internet. There are several companies that will do it for you, but charge heavily. Yahoo’s help section is not too useful. The help results include items from Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other sites, so finding the aritlce that applies to the Ystore can get challenging sometimes.

Overall, Ystore is a great offering. Our recommendation is that if you are planning to create a store using Ystore, consult with a reliable online marketing company about SEO upfront. Doing that upfront is much easier.

OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.

Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.

Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.

Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.

Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.

Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.

We see websites all over the place that sell something or the other. Anything that’s available in a real world store (well, almost) and more (digital assets) are available online. If making money from Ecommerce or other ways online sounds thrilling to you, then you might have taken a few minutes to search on Google for phases such as “make money online” or “online website business” or “sell shoes online”. Try any of these searches and you’ll find thousands of websites and programs that claim that making money or selling online is the easiest thing to do. Many will even show you pictures of their checks and some will go as far as giving you a 110% money back guarantee to buy into their money-making idea. So, given all that, here’s the million dollar question - Are all of them really making money?

Our experience (and several studies, btw) show that it’s not as easy as it seems. Take Ecommerce sites for an example.

Ecommerce websites: Putting up a website with valid products might not be an easy task by itself but if you are tech-savvy or know someone who is, that part can be done. Which is why you see thousands of sites selling stuff. Are they making money? We know for a fact that many aren’t. We get approached by Online store owners that have a site that does ZERO sales after months of promotions. It truly is not easy to sell online. On the other hand, we have promoted many sites that do thousands of dollars in sales every day. What separates the profitable ones from the others is mainly 2 things.

a. Smart Online Market Research: There are several tools that help you analyze what people are searching for. Google Trends, Google Keyword Tool, Ebay Keyword Analyzers such as TeraPeak, and many more. Analyzing online consumer behavior is key to selecting a product that has a chance of succeeding.

b. Product differentiation: Choosing a product that differentiates itself from the competition is a time-tested marketing concept for success. It applies online even more so. Online, why would someone buy from maryselectronics.com when the exact same item is available, often cheaper, at amazon.com? On the other hand, if you were maryspinkelectronics.com, now you stand out and may be you’ll have an audience that is looking for your products.

c. Intelligent Marketing: Offline, location is critical. If you have a store on a busy intersection, you will probably find people stop by without any marketing. Online, there is no such thing. There are over 3 trillion web pages and yours is just one of them. Promoting your site at the right places and targeting the right keywords for search optimization are ESSENTIAL.

Keeping these three principles are likely to ensure a much better chance for success for your website or online store. Now go online and look at stores out there. How many of these do you think are doing all three? You willl be surprised - not even one out of 10. There are too many domains out there that don’t have a site on it. There are many sites that have no visitors and many visited sites that don’t make any money. It’s not an easy thing, which is why if you really think you have a good product to offer online, consult with a good online marketing company to help you sell it. Making money online is possible and thrilling, but that does not make it easy.

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?

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..