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

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/

As the #1 ad network, Google content network commands approximately 80 percent of the global network user. Thousands or even millions of advertisers use Google to reach out to their target audience and consumer base. Virtually all websites, big or small, take advantage of Google’s wide audience share and content niche to set their message across the World Wide Web. Although Google have already introduced Google Publication, website owners are still drawn to Google Content Network to effectively establish high traffic.

The network seems to mainly work for advertisers as it aids the delivery of measured ROI, making everyone accustomed to its convenient and easy search campaigns. Although the network presents a number of challenges to demonstrate the same ROI from the ad content, more and more online retailers are continuously impress by how well Google Content Network can influence their target market share. To better understand how the network works, let us explore this practical segment of Google applications.

Google Network is actually composed of a large group of websites and other products, emails and blogs that partnered with Google for their page rank and increase traffic campaign. One thing that makes the network appealing to advertisers is that they run on all Google Network with no extra cost. Taking advantage of such opportunity to reach out to millions of web surfers all over the world is something that a smart advertiser will never miss.

Google Network has two basic components; the search network and the content network. To cater to the ever expanding and increasing number of websites and products that needed to be advertised, Google concentrated postings of AdWords in its content network. That way, all websites and products will be reviewed and monitored to make sure that they comply with Google’s rigorous standards. As the content network grows, the stricter the standards and rules on advertising become.

The effectiveness and popularity drawn by a particular ad will greatly depend on the content theme of the website. Its popularity may be triggered or influenced by its keyword use of keyword placement. Through contextual targeting, a website that contains high-quality content will surely become relevant especially when it comes to the rankings of Google search results. With the right approach to keyword-targeted campaign, Google Content Network may improve the Google page rank or increase the relevance of a particular product or online retailer site.

Aside from keyword use, there are other factors that affect how ad campaigns operate in Google Content Network. Since Google has already partnered with a variety of websites, it supports virtually all categories of online networks. For instance, it works with Reuters and CNN to bring out relevant news by the hour. It also works social networks as well as small niche sites, which practically make Google ad pages accessible to all. Also, ad formats plays a vital role to increasing a website’s relevance in all Google Network. By making the ad page brief, straightforward and engaging ensures the delivery of the message to the right user.

Altogether, the practical applications of Google Content Network help online retailers to bring out the right ad to the right people. It gives full control over some parts of the network so their advertising pages can reach the right audience. As a result, websites can better establish their relevance to the business, product or service they represent in the highly competitive world of World Wide Web.

Image Courtesy : http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4184E54D3B439FB9

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!

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.

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.