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In the previous newsletter, what I shared with you was how to use email marketing to infiltrate your market and maximize your every single marketing dollar. I touched on how to instead of reaching out to the general market to narrowing it down to your customer base. Indeed, email marketing is a powerful tool to use for the building of a good customer base.
But before all of that, what you need to learn are a couple of tricks on how to attract traffic to your websites. Without traffic, there can be no newsletter subscribers.
It is general knowledge that in online marketing and email marketing, we have countless ways, in terms of strategies, to attract traffic. But in this newsletter, I will share with you a few marketing strategies that will REALLY help your business. Real ideas that work.
And they are Search Engine Optimization, Google Adwords, Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing and Blogging.
It’s not the end all and be all in the online world so, along the way, I will also share with you some tips on how to leverage traffic using other auction websites like Lelong.com and eBay.com. In online marketing, it is absolutely crucial that one remains fluid and flexible to new ideas. Therefore, from time to time, I might change the way I market stuff because that is the way the online marketing landscape is shaped.
But let’s start with Search Engine Optimization or SEO, as some would call it and I would like to focus on Google only because the lion’s share for SEO lies very much with Google these days…more than 50% share of it, I have to say, when you compare it to other search engines in the market.
There are, in the nutshell, three things that you need to focus on if you wanted your websites or blogs to rank highly on Google Search Engine:
- Visibility
- Relevance
- Reputation
Just do what Google wants you to do. As worrying as this may sound, it is not exactly rocket science but you will need a couple of things to get ahead of your competitors…discipline and patience.
Few understand the concept of online marketing in its proper sense: it is a continuous job whether it is offline or online marketing. Let’s take a look at how visible your website or blog is on Google and web surfers, how relevant your website’s content is to searches and your reputation. When talking about reputation, we are talking about how much authority Google attached to your website for keywords concerned.
In this newsletter, I am going to focus on Relevance.
Why Google Want Relevance? Don’t believe me, believe every other book, newsletter or article about Google Search Engine. They will all tell you that you need to have relevant content on your website and it is utterly so important to Google when they compare you to other websites. Why?
It is all about the money. Of course, we are not talking YOUR money; we are talking about Google’s money. Let me share something with you.
There are two kinds of search results on Google. One is what we call organic search engine results and the other one is called paid search results or Pay Per Click (PPC) OR Google Adwords. (You will be seeing a lot about Google Adwords throughout this newsletter).
As you can see in the diagram below, we see the results for ‘web design Malaysia’.
Just like every other business, Google needs a stream of income and the main income for Google is Google Adwords. They need the money to sustain the large enterprise and other businesses that they have acquired over the years. For example, Google has to sustain YouTube (believe you me, YouTube continues to lose money up till this very day).
And in the following diagram, we see what will happen if 90% of the returned search results are NOT relevant to what a web user has searched for.
From the diagram, we can deduce that only 10% of the results are relevant to what you are looking for and the rest…is not even remotely related to what you want to find. If this was the result that you get, would you ever want to use Google again? Of course, the answer would be a very simple ‘no’. You will find another search engine to use.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the traffic and usage of Google decrease. There would also be a decrease in the number of clicks on their advertisements (Google Adwords) and soon, the advertisers would, common sense tells us, leave too. Advertisers will figure out that if fewer people used Google to search for online links, their advertising dollars would be wasted. Suffice to say, that would also mean a decrease in Google’s income.
Think about it, if search engine result relevancy is important to you, as an internet user, it means so much more to Google. And Google is serious about relevance because they would not do anything stupid to kill their income stream.
And that would explain why Google is harsh on those who abuse their engine especially low quality websites. They are absolutely; trust me, serious about it. (Link)
At the end of the day, how do we make our websites relevant to what web surfers are looking for? There is a very big difference between making a website that is relevant to both human beings and to search engines at the same time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that relevancy is all about search engines. You build your website for human beings who are looking for your stuff, users and customers who wish to find you.
That is the very reason why we consistently tell our clients how to build a human-based website. And in my blog, I have reminded my readers, time and again, that the internet is not about just technology. It is about human beings and building relationships.
In order to build a website for your users, simply said, you HAVE TO ‘LISTEN’ to your users and customers by performing a simple keyword analysis. Regardless what industry you are in, listening is indisputably one of the most important things to do.
And this applies to all your online marketing strategies as well.
You need to find out what people are searching for in your industry. What keywords are they using to find you (and your competitors)? What is trending in your industry? What are people talking about if they are talking about your company and products? Are there negative or positive feedbacks that you are missing? Are these feedbacks affecting the image of your brand, company or product without you knowing?
Not many people know this but Google has a whole host of free tools for keyword analysis. For example, there is Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Insignt Search, Google Set, Google Trends, and of course, Google Search Engine (which is something I will delve into in future newsletters).
But let’s start with something easy to do – analyze your keywords. Once you have them, place them into your articles so that when people look for them, it pops up in search engines because your content is relevant.
For this, you might need a bit of copywriting skills to order to produce convincing content. The copywriting will persuade your customers to take action. The call for action.
Sound like a lot of things to do? Perhaps. And I’ll have you know that we are only touching the tip of ice berg. I’ve not even delved into other areas like social marketing and blogging. But hey, there’s no free lunch!
Next newsletter will be Search Engine Optimization - Visibility, sign up to get our newsletter.
