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/

There was a time in Google Adwords was considered to be the easiest and most legitimate way to make money, and the modus operandi was very clear. You just had a number of ads sprinkled discreetly all over your website and the moment, somebody clicked on one ad, you would get a fixed amount of money depending on how “costly” that particular ad was. The cost per click was added to your Google account balance and send to you after a given period of time.
 
Many people are under the impression that Adwords cost per click are dropping, but as they say, “it ain’t necessarily so.” The cost per click is going to depend on your particular niche and market. It is also going to depend on how popular your product, services, content and the advertisements pertaining to that particular service and product are. That means that you are selling a product that gets only one click in a day, ah well, it is the luck of the draw. On the other hand, if you are lucky to have advertisements with high-paying keywords sprinkled throughout the ad, there is a chance that you are going to be earning more per click.
 
Many people who have based their business online on profits made through Adwords may be disappointed because a large number of advertisers have begun moving out thanks to the global economic meltdown. This had a negative impact on costs per click. That is the reason why Google showed a decrease in income last year. Nevertheless, now is the time to take full advantage of retaining a profitable ad position, as well as the top page position ranking. This is the way you are going to do it systematically -
 
It is time to do a bit of cost per click reviewing, and drop the bids, per click. You have to make sure that this does not have any negative impact on your profitability. Drop your bid from .10 cents to a dollar. Hot keywords are still going up, but the overall market trend shows downward drops in CPC.
 
Google is trying it is best to stem this downward trend by looking at ways and methods in which they can increase CPC for their advertisers. This might take the form of looking at bidding at minimum cost per clicks that Yahoo has already begun on a number of keywords.
 
The point is - you have to make sure that you have plenty of conversions as well as more traffic coming on to the website so that you can have adequate compensation for supposedly falling click through rates, and CPC changes. This can be done by defining your content and looking at the conversion reports to see which keywords got clicked more often. Then fresh new content with relevant information is going to bring more traffic to your website. You would also need to improve your landing pages, and look to your PPC campaign strategies to see if any modification and innovations need to be done to get the most out of CPC and Google Adwords adverts.
 

Image Courtesy: http://www.pjlighthouse.com/2007/04/page/2/

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

One of your goals with your ecommerce site is to get high search engine rankings. Getting ranked good on search engines is a key to getting traffic to your site, which will in turn, bring you sales and profit. Improving your search engine rankings and getting a top spot is not always easy, especially when you are first starting out. With 7 easy steps, though, you can optimize your ecommerce site.

Step 1: Create Individual Pages

You will probably need to go back over your website and make some changes when you first start the process of optimizing your website. You should have a page dedicated to each of your products. This will allow you to create unique content for each product and take advantage of the ability to capitalize on more keywords.

Step 2: Unique Content

Now that you have your website set up with each product on its own page, you can begin to get into content. Content plays a large role in search engine rankings, but just having a few lines of text on a page doesn’t do it. You have to have content that is unique and that is valuable. You likely have product descriptions, but these are not unique. If you sell a common product then chances are that same description is being used all over the internet. Reword the descriptions or better; write up a short article about the product.

Step 3: Cross Referencing

When you are creating the unique content you should cross reference other products that you sell. This links the pages of your website in a very natural fashion.

Step 4: Keep Adding Content

Content is very important to your search engine rankings, so do not stop adding new, fresh content to your website. You can add a blog that will allow you to keep adding new content on your site on a regular basis. You can also just add in articles where you see fit. Whatever you do, just add content often.

Step 5: Links

Content is not the only thing that is considered during search engine rankings. You should also have good quality links to other websites. When you link up to websites that have rankings then that will help you in your rankings.

Step 6: Get Reviews

Reviews not only add content to your website, but also encourage buyers. You can ask current customers to review the product for you and give them a coupon for their next purchase.

Step 7: Go Social

Social networking sites are amazing. The potential for a business person on these sites is amazing. You should join as many as possible. Make sure you stay active, add friends and post content. This is free advertising and it allows you to link up to these popular sites.

Optimizing your website does not have to be tedious. You just need to make sure that you are doing everything you can. You have to stay with it as it is an ongoing process. The internet is very fluid and things change everyday, so stay on top of things and your website should end up on top.

image Courtesy: http://www.netlogical.com/

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!

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.

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.