Short Term Website Marketing Strategies For The Holidays: Is PPC (pay-per-click) Right for Your Business or Organization?
Posted by Salem Global on Nov 10, 2009
Many people have been asking me recently about my Internet marketing services. I am hoping it is a sign of the economic times and that things are changing for the better. My theory is that after the crash of ‘08, people just were recovering in 2009 and have set their budgets for 2010. In anticipation of 2010 though, people are recognizing that the holidays are upon us and they don’t want to wait a whole year to start making cash. The problem is that people don’t realize that there is a major difference between a long term website marketing strategy and a short one.
Many people also confuse what I do as SEO or search engine optimization. They don’t realize that website and Internet marketing is a comprehensive strategy that includes a process that strives to achieve your goals whatever they may be. The best marketing strategy any organization can have is one that achieves long term and short term goals. That being said, the goal for ANY organization should be to make money now and make money in the future. Put in more professional terminology, you have to achieve profitability. Put in layman’s terms, MAKE CASH!
So if you are seeking to make cash today, the only way to do it is to get on the PPC or pay-per-click bandwagon. Now when I say PPC, I mean Google. True, millions of people are using Yahoo and Bing, but the way that I see it is that BILLIONS of people are using Google. So certainly there are people using those other search engines, but why not go with the most traffic…. and the answer is that it is more expensive. My answer to that is “so what!”
But before you set your budget and think you are going to start selling, please note that click fraud still exists. And by click fraud I don’t mean someone in India or Russia or Israel setting up a bot to click on your ad so that Google gets paid and you don’t. I mean Google will still take your money regardless of whether it’s some guy in California, some SEO firm in New York, some craigslist freelancer in Chicago or whatever. You always have to account for click fraud or whatever you want to call it.
And the old advertising adage about consumers needing to see your ad 5-7 times still applies. Though my theory is that it is probably more like 2-4 times instead. Regardless, you should know that you are not going to have a 100% click through and conversion rate. (Even the shamwow guy doesn’t have that rate of return… and look where that guy is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMxIAn_76g)
So in conclusion, PPC is the way to go for today and the next 2 months of holiday selling. Next week we will talk about more PPC strategies, how to write your ads, how to budget and how to use PPC in local listings. If you want to know more about PPC and website marketing - give me a call at212-993-5828 or email me at raphis@salemglobal.com or check out www.SalemGlobal.com. Time is running out so don’t delay! Order yours today!
People Capital Finalist in S Contest
Posted by Aryeh.Landowne on Oct 12, 2009
People Capital has been selected as one of five finalists in the S Contest, a contest in which applicants are ranked based on the amount of positive, ongoing impact on society and/or the environment that they have.
People Capital and their Peer to Peer Lending platform are revolutionizing the way student loans are applied for and received. Using the innovative Human Capital Score, People Capital can match students and lenders in a social networking-type environment.
Check out their site, www.People2Capital.com, and then go vote for them at SDialogue.com.
Website Marketing Basics: How To Write A Press Release
Posted by Salem Global on Sep 30, 2009
I just came back from a meeting with a personnel staffing organization. They are experts in resume writing. They really know what a company is looking for and how to best present a potential employee. A resume is your one shot at the title, if it doesn’t look good you have pretty much no chance at getting hired (unless of course you father owns the company).
Last year, this company was invited by Vibe Magazine to work on Jay-Z’s resume. The proper use of press releases would be to announce this to as many media outlets as possible and of course the world. However, PR is tricky. If you were to write an article, it would not be accepted as a press release. So therefore writing a press release has to be crafted in a very specific way. At SalemGlobal we mostly use PR Web. They allow us to distribute press releases to thousands of media outlets and websites. These press releases should follow the same format as any search engine optimized web page. Meaning your primary keywords should be at the top of the press release and anchor text should be used to link to important landing pages and your home page.
Press releases help one of our clients, a NJ homeless shelter and soup kitchen (www.EvasVillage.org), spread the word about their services. Two winters ago they wrote a press release announcing their open doors for the homeless during the winter. This news was so enticing that it was picked up by the weather channel.
In conclusion, you should be writing a minimum of one press release a month, prioritizing your keywords and linking to and from your press release. Next week we will talk about gearing up for the holiday season and how you should prepare for it from a marketing perspective.
If you have any questions or would like help writing press releases email me at raphis@salemglobal.com, call us at 212-993-5828 or visit www.SalemGlobal.com for more information.
Website Marketing Basics: Linking Strategies and Interactive PR
Posted by Salem Global on Sep 22, 2009
Linking is essential to any website marketing campaign. As discussed in past weeks, content declares you the “authority” on a subject but links declare you to be “popular.” In order to get to the top of Google and other search engines, you have to achieve a certain balance of these two things. I happen to think that the Google’s chief scientist is smarter than most website marketing professionals and he can tell whether people are gaming the system or not. So though the industry has many thoughts, ideas and philosophies on the matter, I still recommend the standard building your site and links the natural slow and steady way. Don’t believe the 300,000 links for $3.00 model. It never works. Time, on the other hand, and effort and building up your site with industry knowledge will get you where you want to go.
According to Alexa.com, the top 5 sites in the world are: Google, Facebook , Yahoo, YouTube, and Windows Live. Certainly you have all heard of those top 5 sites. But check out how many links they each have: (type link:www.DOMAINNAME.com into search window)
Google (565,000 links according to Google, 255 million according to Yahoo)
Facebook (176,000 G links, 55mil Y)
Yahoo (5,610 G links, 147mil Y)
YouTube (1,680 G links, 46mil Y)
Windows Live (37,800 G links, 1.6mil Y)
Now you and I will most probably never achieve these statistics. (Unless you are a budding Internet entrepreneur and you read my tips of the week LOL!) But one strategy that has been working for us is Interactive Public Relations. Writing press releases announces to the world what you are announcing and what you are working on. But writing your piece is not a battle at all; distributing it is. We happen to use PRWeb but there are plenty of other PR distribution companies out there at different price points so do your research.
Our best example of Interactive PR is a campaign we are working on for Eva’s Village (http://www.EvasVillage.org, 48 Google links, 3,238 Yahoo links). The fact that our press releases have reached hundreds of media outlets is great. But even better is when it is picked up by local and national media as in the case when it was picked up by the Weather Channel and MSNBC. The links from any old website are good. Links from a popular and relevant website are better. But links from a local and/or national news media outlet is the best. So always strive to write something interesting about your organization and announce it to the world. You will be glad you did.
Next week we will talk about how to write a press release. If you would like to know more, please contact me for a free, no obligation website marketing evaluation, consult and assessment. Call 212-993-5828, email raphis@salemglobal.com or visit our site, www.SalemGlobal.com.
Website Marketing Basics: Linking From Marketing Websites
Posted by Salem Global on Sep 21, 2009
Last week we had a review of why linking is so important. It declares you the most “popular” website in your industry, field and niche. “Popularity,” coupled with “authority” should yield the highest search engine position for relevance for a keyword search.
Since the 90’s I always wondered why people didn’t have their own in-house marketing person or department. It seemed too natural to me to just “do it myself.” But then I matured and realized that not everyone has the skill set that one needs to drive business and fresh leads into the door. And on top of that, while some people might have those skills, they might not necessarily have the time. And a final perspective is that maybe they have the time but they are investing in product and service and not necessarily marketing.
Regardless of the above, all businesses and organizations should have a “corporate” website as well as a “marketing” website. I like to call it the webs answer to franchising. In other words, every retail store and operation started out with 1 store. Nathan’s. McDonalds. Burger King. Dunkin Donuts. And yes, even Starbucks and Duane Reade. My point is that you need to have more than one location on the web as well. And just as each Kentucky Fried Chicken and Subway has to prepare its own food, serve it and clean up after themselves in the evening, the same principle applies to websites. Yes the old “location, location, location” absolutely is important, but on the web its also about Branding branding branding!
So if you are in the healthcare industry, you will want the corporate name of http://www.DrJackieSmiles.com. But at the same time, you will also want http://www.OrthodontistNYC.com. Because people will find you and hear about you and will go to your main website. But then there will be people who will search the Internet in many different ways via different popular keyword searches and you will want to be found as well. So the lesson for today is that it’s not only about relevant content, it’s also about strategic domain name with strategic keywords, as well as marketing yourself in as many places as possible. And the link juice from these marketing sites is going to be very potent as well if you build them up.
Next week we will discuss linking strategies and interactive PR. If you would like to know more, please contact me for a free, no obligation website marketing evaluation, consult and assessment. Call 212-993-5828, email raphis@salemglobal.com or visit our site, www.SalemGlobal.com.
Website Marketing Basics: Implementation of Keywords
Posted by Salem Global on Sep 1, 2009
By now, everyone should know that keywords are the basis of all search and website optimization. Keywords, as we learned in last week’s tip, are found by industry experience, knowledge and online software. But now that you have your list and you have prioritized it, what do you do with it?
First thing is place it in your meta data. Considering that your <title> and <description> are the most important places for your keywords, make sure that they are not only in your homepage meta data, but also on internal pages as well. Some people think that they can put in on their home page and maybe even replicate it on the internal pages. But this is not true. You need to prioritize according to each page subject and content.
Keywords should also be placed in the URL string. Obviously your homepage is going to default to index.html, index.php or something of that nature, but in your internal pages you should be naming the URL strings according the keyword topic as well. For example, I named one of my internal pages for my site marketing.php and for two word phrases check out website-marketing.php. Funny thing about keywords is that some people have typos and misspellings. Always be careful to spell correctly.
Content. Content must be aligned with your meta data and URL string. Obviously, whatever you are promoting or selling must be written about. Make sure your keywords are the title of your pages and also in <H1>, <H2> or <H3> tags. Be careful about keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the activity where you just repeat the word over and over even though it makes no sense. Believe me, keyword stuffing used to work back in the 90’s and that was called black hat SEO. But search engines are a lot smarter today than ever so you can’t do that anymore. Your content has to be clear and make sense.
Finally, use your keywords outside of your website as well. Use keywords for anchor text when linking from other sites. Use keywords when writing articles and Press releases or when you comment on blogs and forums.
Next week we will talk about linking and how it will help your website become more popular.
Website Marketing Basics: Keyword Research
Posted by Salem Global on Aug 24, 2009
For this weeks tip of the week we’ll start by getting back to basics.
This means keyword research. All search engine optimization and website marketing stems from keywords and from prioritization of these keywords. There are three variables that must be accounted for when doing keyword research.
1. Industry knowledge; you’ve been in business for X amount of years, no one knows your industry better than you, you are the authority on your company, your topic, your business, your industry. Therefore, your keywords start with you. Make a list of keywords that you think people will search for you under. Then ask you clients and customers how they search for you and ultimately find you. Also, what location are you trying to target? Are you local or national? If you are local to New York, and even more, targeting towards New York City, don’t forget that there are five ways of saying New York City (NY, NYC, New York, New York City, and Manhattan). And what about your street; are you on Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, Wall Street? And finally, if you are in suburbia or in a neighborhood are you downtown, uptown, UES, UWS, midtown etc.? All of these factor into researching your keywords.
2. Now that you’ve identified your own keywords, we need to go to Google. At https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal you will find Google’s somewhat exact (and we believe there is some margin of error) numbers revealing how many searches there are every month for a particular keyword or keyword phrase (i.e. “website marketing” yields 165,000 searches per month and it just so happens that SalemGlobal shows up first in Google for “website marketing” so you can only imagine how many leads we get per month).
3. The third variable is the marketing expert. Meaning, you will know your own industry and the software will reveal the numbers involved but only a marketing professional can add the insight needed to successfully market your business.
Your keywords and prioritization of keywords are the basis to any online marketing campaign, if you would like to know more or have any questions feel free to email me at raphis@salemglobal.com, call us at 212-993-5828 or visit our website, www.SalemGlobal.com
Next week we will talk about implementation of keywords, where and how to implement these keywords.
Vlogging, Video Logs, YouTube & TubeMogul - Creating Videos for your Practice or Business
Posted by Salem Global on Jul 28, 2009
We have spoken about blogging, creating a diary on the web for you and your business and your medical practice, but now its time to step it up to the world of multi-media. With the disk space and data capacity of your computer surpassing the 200 Gigabyte hurdle and approaching the Terabyte, you now have the room to create, edit, store and distribute video to your audience. Somewhere out there, there are statistics that show how many videos there are on YouTube and how much space it takes up. (I have no idea how accurate this page is or when it is from but it is quite interesting - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722200032AA3kQaH)
Regardless of all of those fun statistics, my goal is to get you business from your Internet marketing. So go out and get yourself a Flip Cam and start promoting yourself. Either set up your flip cam on a tri-pod or on top of something or have someone hold it. (The only problem with having someone hold it is shaky hand syndrome.)
Now start talking about yourself, your firm, practice, company etc. Talk about everything we have been writing about for the past 10 years. Make sure it is relevant to your business. Don’t ramble on about social stuff. Save that for your free time (ha!) Be sure to focus on what services or products you are selling and/or promoting. As an example, look at SalemGlobal’s YouTube channel.
Then buy yourself Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premier Elements and edit your video. Don’t forget to brand your video with your URL and phone number.
Next, get yourself an account at TubeMogul.com and distribute your video there. It basically takes you from one Youtube account to dozens of others. And then blog about it and put it on your website.
Remember, the more places you are, the more chances people will see you and get to know about your products and services. All you need is one person to watch your video to call you and become your customer.
Next week we can get into specifics about industries and tips for optimizing your video. If you are in a specific industry and need help or advice, just let me know. Email me, call me at 212-993-5828 or visit www.SalemGlobal.com.
Blogging for Doctors (healthcare and medical practices and offices of all sizes)
Posted by Aryeh.Landowne on Jul 21, 2009
When I was thinking about what to write for this post, I was thinking that I should title it “Doctor’s Blog,” which made me laugh because my staff and I were joking around about the rivalry between Star Trek and Star Wars and William Shatner and well… He used to end each show with “Captain’s Log.” And really - so should you. (But as you can see I went with the blogging for doctors which also makes me laugh because it sounds like “bowling for doctors.”)
As a doctor you are either seeing patients or treating patients. You are consulting with them. You are meeting with them, evaluating their aches and pains and hopefully just seeing them for “well” visits. I know from my own experience with doctors over the past years when I have been relatively “well,” that I get asked the usual questions regarding breathing, exercise, activity, stress etc. etc. Then they look in the ear, nose and throat, take my blood pressure and I am on my way.
What I described above is NOT what you should be writing about. I guarantee you the worst and most boring blog if you stick to the above formula. What you need to do is talk about the special cases. Describe the person - obviously with professional courtesy and confidentiality in mind. Tell your audience whether they are male or female, age and issue. Obviously, whatever your specialty - orthodontist, dentist, plastic surgeon, podiatrist, dermatologist, eye doctor, lasik etc… you will want to customize your blog to whatever is the ailment or situation of the day. How crooked this guys teeth are or how bad this woman’s eyesight is. Then you should share with the audience what evaluation you are giving, solution and procedure. Blog about preparation (Lasik candidates have to put eye drops in their eyes and drinks lots of fluids). And then what recovery will be like and what to expect.
I will never forget when my brother in law (who is a dentist in Larchmont, NY -www.21stCenturyDentist.com Dr. Joel Levy) told me about a patient who is a good guy, came in after eating a burger with EXTRA ONIONS! He laughed about it, I remembered and that could’ve been a great blog piece.
So if you are a doctor or know someone that is, and you or they would like a free consultation or some advice on how to blog. Just let me know. Email me, call me at 212-993-5828 or visit www.SalemGlobal.com. Next week we will get into a new topic and series regarding Vlogging or video logs - creating videos for your practice or business.
Article Writing Within Your Industry
Posted by Aryeh.Landowne on Jun 1, 2009
Last week we spoke about article writing as it pertains to the season and the calendar. This week I’d like to focus on some industries that we work with as well as general businesses. First you have to recognize if you are u a “B to B” or a “B to C” company. Obviously a “B to B” is going to have a different message then a “B to C” company. “B to C” companies are dealing mainly with sales or service to one customer at a time. Whereas “B to B” companies are all about lead generation and sales of a usually higher ticket price or higher nature.
If you are in the healthcare/medical industry, your article should be focused on your expertise. SalemGlobal mainly deals with about six types of doctors: dentists, orthodontists, podiatrists, dermatologists, plastic surgeons, and eye doctors/LASIK surgeons. Obviously, your expertise is going to get more defined when you talk about the specific nature of a specific procedure and/or a specific disease, aliment, symptoms, treatment and or cure. One example is a possible article for an orthodontist to write about Invisalign, how the procedure is done, how it compares to traditional braces and what benefits someone would get out of having straighter teeth.
If you are a lawyer, you might be either “B to B”, having individual clients or “B to C”, representing companies and businesses. For example, SalemGobal works with an immigration lawyer; a great article for her would be all about the laws governing immigration, who it applies to, potential costs, as well as ramifications if one does not adhere to the law. There is a movie coming out with Sandra Bullock, where she plays a Canadian citizen whose American visa has expired and at that moment (or at least at that moment of the trailer) she announces her engagement to her assistant. Stay tuned to whether this is a good or bad movie.
Next week we will talk about some more industries and if you have a question or need help writing an article about your business, please get in touch with us, we’d be happy to guide you on your way. Just give us a call at 212-993-5828 or check out our website at http://www.SalemGlobal.com.