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

Everybody knows the first rule of marketing “it always pays to advertise.” That is the reason why it is necessary for any farsighted businessman to make sure that everybody around him knows everything about his business, his products and most of all, his website. However, you do not have to spend thousands of dollars on advertising on the Internet. Some easy and simple strategic moves can be followed quite effectively to ensure that your target market knows everything about your business while keeping well within range within your marketing and advertising budget.

Blog Creation

A good market buzz starts with a simple blog. Get people to know more about your company and your products by setting up a blog. There are plenty of blogging systems, which can be utilized without your paying a single red cent. It is always a good marketing strategy to write a blog, which is personalized instead of having a formal sales letter advocating your product. What you need to do is entice the readers to communicate with you, and make them think you know them and they know you. This sort of person to person communication can only be done when you respond to their queries.

User-Friendly Website

You can also link your website with a number of other business websites as well as your own. Make your browser user-friendly by adding features, which can allow them to interact with you as well as with other readers. Make sure that your website can be navigated very easily, and loads up really fast.

RSS Feed

Keep your visitors as well as your future potential clients updated with what is happening in your company. This can only be done by an RSS feed; if you can manage to get out a newsletter to tell them what is going on in your particular field of interest, this shows a level of professionalism, which is definitely quite a good marketing strategy.

Quality Content

The search engines like content, which is rich in keywords. An ordinary viewer coming onto your website for the first time definitely does not like content, which is filled with lots of keywords, which the Webmaster considers to be good enough to entice traffic to his site. What he needs is good and useful quality content, which is amusing enough, informative enough, and interesting enough to make a visitor come to that site again and again. Good quality content should be renewed at least once a week and the old content placed somewhere on the website in an index.

Have a Chatty Forum

Everybody likes to talk; and when you give everybody an opportunity to give their own opinion, as well as declare their own views about some particular thing or product, you are going to be extremely surprised how many people come onto your website, just to read somebody else’s opinion, and give their own views.

Reciprocal links

Always remember to have links which open up very easily, especially when you are responding to some particular prospective client’s mail or query letter. In the same manner, any link to any other well-established website which has relevant content is definitely a good idea.
Article directories:
Write an informative article upon your product and then add your link at the bottom of the article. Submit this article to different article directories.
Try these website promotion strategies out now!

Image Courtesy : www.higginstraffic.com

Okay, so you’re spending a lot of time searching for various keywords, but the SEO just isn’t coming out the way you hoped. It happens all the time and no matter how you put it, the truth of the matter is you just aren’t using the right keyword research tool. Most people don’t want to spend the money on an expensive software tool, so they’re left with the free versions.

We decided to take a little time out of our day and tell you about the top 5 keyword research tools out there. Obviously you’re going to have to put up a little money, but you should expect to, considering everything you’ve done up to this point hasn’t made you hardly any money at all. Plus, all the time you’ve had to spend for basically nothing.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

If you’ve tried to take on the pay per click arena, you came across this keyword tool a time or two. It doesn’t cost you anything to use it, but just remember that you have to spend the time doing it yourself. Finding the right keywords can take hours, even days depending on the criteria you’ve put in place.

Word Tracker

You’ll find that most people turn to the Word Tracker when they don’t want to spend money on a true keyword research tool. The only problem with Word Tracker is it isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, if you compare it to Google Adwords, there are several contrasts between the two of them. Plus, it only gives you the searches, and they’re on a daily basis instead of monthly.

Utilizing Others

When we first started to give out the top 5 keyword research tools, we planned on listing all of them. Unfortunately, the more we thought about it, there isn’t #1-#5 and all of them have pretty much the same benefits and downfalls. Well, all except one. The only difference is it’s not your average keyword research tool. It’s a place where you can find all the best ones in the same place.

What they do is offer you everything from Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Word Tracker, SEODigger, and all kinds of other tools for your marketing pleasure. Sometimes it’s just a lot easier to look in one place for all the answers, then try searching all over the place. When you get to this point, we highly recommend looking into the Click Depot. It should help you get what you need from the top keyword research tools.

Image Courtesy : http://www.kortia.com/keyword-analysis.html

If you have a website, then you know that it cannot possibly survive without the right amount of traffic. What’s the use in having a killer page that no one visits? It’s literally like you have went through the trouble for nothing. If you have found yourself in this situation, then you might need a couple of pointers to help guide the way to driving more traffic to your website.

Listed below are some proven ways to start getting the traffic that your website needs to thrive:

1.Sign up to free ad forums – Any time that you have a chance, take some time out to sign up to a couple of these very helpful advertising spaces. The more that you sign up to and post, the more traffic you will get in return.

2. Above all, make sure that you have fresh, up to date, and interesting web content – Only write about those things that you know people are going to be fascinated with. A good way to know is to think about what fascinates you. What is something that you really enjoy talking about? You also need to make sure that you can go into a bit of detail about your subject. Content that is vague and fuzzy has no point of existence. Frequently add updates to your site, and you will notice that people keep coming back to find more fresh, true content.

3. Sign up to an affiliate program – Getting others to promote your site or products is a wonderful way to increase traffic to it’s maximum potential. The only downside is that you may have to allow a percentage to go to the one’s who are promoting the website. But hey, at least they are helping to drive traffic, right? And without them, you most likely wouldn’t have as much traffic as you should. Some people use this method by itself and find that it keeps their website booming with traffic.

4. Sign up to a video casting website – This is another great way to get the word out there about your website, and it is also extremely popular right now. People are constantly logging into those types of sites to see what videos are hot and also to see what everyone is talking about. Just make sure that you include a link to your website in the video, and you will see that traffic is headed your way.

5. Gain traffic through link exchange – All you have to do is contact the individuals who own the site, and give them your website address. You’ll be promoting their sites, and they will be promoting yours. A good way to begin is to contact someone that you know gets a good bit of traffic, because that is where the people are.

6. Keyword your website – Do a search on the topic of which you will be talking about, and figure out what keywords are used to search for pages that are similar to yours. You might even find that some of the search phrases are a bit odd, but just try your best to incorporate them into your content.

7. Use online forums to market your website – Find a forum that you are interested in, and visit it frequently. Talk about things that relate to your website because you never know, your page just might be the answer to someone’s question! And furthermore, participating in online forums is a fun way to promote your page.

Follow these 7 essentials, and your page will end up with more traffic than New York Times Square!

Image Courtesy : http://nasirjafri.com/improve-web-site-traffic/

Determining a website’s Click Through Rate or CTR is one effective way of measuring how effective an online advertising campaign is. CTR is usually obtained by keeping track of the number of users who actually clicked on a particular ad with respect to the number of times that a particular user has clicked on the ad. There are a number of ways on which you can improve your site’s CTR. Below is an outline of five easy steps to improve CTR without doing anything highly technical or magical.

One

Getting the number of clicks you needed to fully advertise your site would need the use of certain keywords. Yes people, online advertising is all about keywords. The effective use of keywords is one way of inviting people to click on your ad links, which increases your website’s CTR and improve your ad position.

Two

The use of website content keywords is one effective way of drawing more traffic to your website. This is because URL links are embedded through the keywords. Aside from getting high quality and relevant content, your web page needs to use the right color palette for its keyword links or hyperlinks. Blending ad content with bright colors was never effective. People are used to the blue hyperlinks, which consequently is one of the most clicked hyperlink color. Most advertisers use shades of black or grey because very light hyperlink colors make the reader look too long on the URL, which gives readers enough time to realize that it is an advertisement and decide not to click on the link.

Three

Think about putting signup pages to your site’s homepage. Not only will it collect e-mail addresses to accommodate your website’s free downloads, this step will also help you in running a split test, which is helpful in determining which types of freebies your visitors respond well to. This will also help you manipulate your system of delivering marketing copies and messages such as sales letters and email newsletters to your avid visitors, which is also helpful in provoking immediate response and continuous patronage from your target audience.

Four

Putting individual product pages is a great way introducing your visitors to the product or service you are selling. Product pages are essential in motivating your visitors to make the decision to buy. Just make sure that your product pages are attention-grabbing to ensure best results. Not only will this step improve your site’s CTR, it will also help you effectively increase your sales.

Five

Aside from setting up product pages, complementing them with seasonal headlines is one way of getting more people to click on your ads. It does not matter if your product is not seasonal, making use of headlines such as “Easter Sale” or “Christmas Sale” is one effective way of targeting local audience, which in turn serves to your site’s CTR advantage.

Hence, to get quality CTR scores for your website you need to do an effective and dynamic keyword insertion and setup a strategic homepage design and information pages. Not only will these ensure advertising success, it will also help you connect better to your target audience.

Image Courtesy : http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2008/05/

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!

One of the things that always irks me is that people don’t view small businesses as serious businesses that put strategic thought into this business plans. That’s so not true. Whether you are a multi-billion dollar company or a company with three employees (or even one for that matter), you need to think about how to grow your business and offer services of value that will help you stand out from competition.

Over the last few weeks, it’s amazing how negative the whole market has been. There is more talk about recession than about getting out of it. The fact that you have a business and are reading this post means that you’ve had the courage to take risk to be on your own. You obviously understand that rational positive attitude (not blind faith or arrogant over-confidence) is ultra important for the success of any business. Times such as now are especially a great time to remember that, not only because it’s the only business your busines will survive, because it can actually be your weapon to capture market share. Let me explain how.

Most people that I talk to are hesitant to make changes at this time. That attitude seems to be - “Hey the market is bad. I am lucky that I still have a job, even though it sucks and I had to take a 10% pay cut or bonus cut”. Or “I am not going to invest into this new idea. I don’t think people are buying at this time”. So WRONG.

People are still buying. Recession only means that instead of the GDP growing at +3%, it’s growing at say +1% or may be during real depressions, -2% or so. So, remember, the overall impact is only about +-5% - that’s not enough to go all negative. Online marketing activity and sales actually GREW this holiday season significantly compared to 2007. Think about it this way - If your company revenue dropped 5% a specific month, would you get all worked up about it and decide not to implement new ideas. Instead, you’d actually work harder to try and actually change things so that they improve, right? How is a recessionary time any different.

Most people fail to realize that simple argument. You can take advantage of that.

1. Market your product on the Internet and find newer creative ways to capture the market.

This is an easy way to get new leads on an ongoing basis for a small investment. A great way to capture market during recession.

2. Improve your product or service so that you stand out from competition.

Most people stay away from this during recession. This is your opportunity to stand out.

Overall recession can be your time to be prosperous and grow!

As we explained in our previous post, autoresponders are indeed any online or offline business;s best friend. OK, but how do you go about getting started in your Email marketing journey? I have bad and good news. The bad new first - it’s not that easy actually and there are some key decisions you will need to make to make sure you do this right. The good news will come at the end of the article.

Autoreponders come in three flavors depending on who sends out the email.

Desktop Based: You buy a software that installs on your desktop, just like your Office softwre. This inclues Mailoop and PrimaSoft. With these, the email is sent out via your chosen ISP - usually your high speed internet provider such as Cox or Comcast. These are good if your email list is small - few hundreds at the most. If your email list is in the thousands, then you are asking for trouble if you adopt this type of software, unless you are super careful. The problem starts with some subscribers of your mailing list using the “This is Spam” buttons on their emails instead of cleanly unsubscribing from your email list using the unsubscribe link. Once your ISP sees a lot of these spam complaints, they just stop sending your emails or notify you that you need to stop sending your emails and you are pretty much stuck at that point.Most ISP’s limit the number of email that you can send out at once. This is usually limited to a few hundred emails. ISP’s also do not offer much of a service guarantee for your email delivery like some of the hosted solutions do.

Server-based: These are basically software or scripts that you install on your website space. Now the email goes out from your hosting provider’s servers, not your ISP. Leading providers are AutoResponse Plus and phpList (Free). In this case as well, you run into similar issues. Hosting providers have a limit of the number of emails you can send out. This is either a per day or per hour limit. Site5.com for instance has a 500 emails per hour limit and SiteGround.Com has a 400 emails per hour limit. There are some others that are more generous. Third Sphere Hosting, for example, allows 20,000 emails per day, but that’s unusual. Now 500 per hour might sound like a lot to you. But really, over time, it’s easy to get into lists that are in the thousands. Just offer a freebie on your website worth a couple of hundred dollars and you could have a few hundred subscribers overnight. That can be good and bad though. On one hand , you have a list of potential buyers now but on the other hand, a lot of those people will never really buy from you but are there just for the freebies. You really can’t do anything about that problem though. Everyone involved with Email faces that issue. You will have to send email to all your list subscribers at least initially before you can segment them into ones that are VIP’s for you and the regualar masses. Coming back to limits on email delivery, once you exceed these limits, and sometimes, even before that, your hosting provider will ask you to move to dedicated hosting, which is usually hundreds of dollars per month. At that point, most will want to consider using a hosted solution.

Hosted Solution: There are way too many to even list here. The leading providers are Aweber, GetResponse, Mailchimp and iContact. These provides own dozens, and some even hundreds of servers that they use to send out their emails. If one of the servers gets in trouble for spam complaints (which are often not valid), then they can still use others to send out their email. Your email has a much higher deliverability chances when you go with these providers. The downsite, well you get to pay a hefty fee for the reliability promise. The cost can be between $15/month to several hundred dollars per month depending on the size or your list and the frequency of your emails. Cost is not the only issue though. Most of these providers require that each of your subscribers double opt in to your list. In other words, if you bring in a list from either of the above options to a hosted provider, your subscriber base will have to confirm that they want to remain part of your list. For many, including good subscribers, they may just decide not to renew their subscription out of laziness. And that could cost you dearly in the long run.

Our recommendation - go with a hosted provider FROM THE BEGINNING. It can cost a bit higher, but you will have your bases covered and potentially save a lot of time and trouble in the long run.